


In the Eye of the Storm

by WitchProject19



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Arlathan (Dragon Age), Canon Fuckery, Crossover, F/M, Gen, M/M, Mass Effect 2, Multi, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Not Canon Compliant, Past Relationship(s), Post Trespasser DLc, Post-Canon, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Pseudoscience, The Blight (Dragon Age), The Veil (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2019-09-22 06:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 57,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17054879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WitchProject19/pseuds/WitchProject19
Summary: Shepard finds out that quarantines never mention a war between pseudo gods in the summary text.





	1. Sah : One

Shepard had a particular distaste for the outer rim systems, not because of the higher number of Batarian ships or the everlasting issue of resource scarcity, but because it was so fucking _cold_. The Normandy was outfitted with the best climate control features and had a brand-new compound weaved into the secondary and tertiary paneling to keep most of the deep space cold at bay, but it didn’t keep it all out, just like the filtration unit only killed 99.999998% of germs in the air. While that usually meant there were colder areas on the ship and EDI would occasionally alert the crew about the current ambient temperature, it didn’t have any truly detrimental effect on their health and wellbeing. Their comfort, on the other hand, took a graceful nosedive into what she liked to call ‘Crew Divider Territory’. 50% of the crew would be fine with it, and 50% would bitch and whine. This time the change from optimal comfort to slightly chilled with a side of sneezy meant she was stuck listening to the other cold-intolerant crew members bitch and whine while they rubbed their chilled hands together like 20th century beggars at their consoles, while the cold-tolerant crewmembers took the piss out of the former group for their bitching and whining. It was fun all around, really. Shepard sighed and stared down at the galaxy map, leaning on the railing while slowly picking through all that she needed to accomplish in the sector before moving on to the next one. The only reason they’d returned to Haestrom was to grab a few more components for whatever the fuck Legion wanted with Geth parts, and a few extra supplies for the hell of it, but the slowly blinking red planetary advisory brought her up short every time she considered setting the Normandy on a path out of the cluster. Part of her wanted to ignore it, she couldn’t be a hero for every small problem that came around, but the fact it read ‘QUARANTINE STATUS REQUIRES UPDATE: PLEASE CONTACT HEALTH ADVISORY BOARD WITH NEW FINDINGS ASAP’ was serious enough to warrant hesitation. After a few more moments Shepard sighed and pushed away from the map, letting it close on its own as she took the path towards Miranda’s office with quick, purposeful steps to dissuade the crew from stopping her. 

“EDI, can you ask Mordin to come to Miranda’s office please?” EDI’s voice immediately filled her ears, partially drowning out the sound of her footsteps as she turned the corner. 

_Request sent, he will be there shortly._ Shepard mumbled her thanks and slid through the door to Miranda’s office as it opened, only offering a short wave to her as she glanced up from her terminal. 

“Shepard.” 

“The one and only. Can you pull the galaxy map up for me?”

“You have a perfectly good navigation terminal on the main deck for that very purpose, Commander.” 

“I know, but I’d like to know what you know about what I’m going to show you.” Miranda sighed and reached over to bring up a smaller projection of the galaxy map, waving a hand to indicate Shepard had free reign over the program. 

“And what, exactly, are you wondering about? You know I can’t give you any specifics about Cerberus operations.” 

“How about quarantines?” She tilted her head in thought, pausing what she was doing before going back to tapping away at her terminal as if Shepard hadn’t just interrupted her entire work flow. 

“Depends on the type. Cerberus has proprietary technology that other organizations use to enact a quarantine, but we’ve never been directly involved with one.” Shepard nodded, pulling up their current cluster and cycling through the planets one by one until she hit the one that was labelled with the tag.

“Planetary quarantines?”

“If an entire planet’s been placed on quarantine, there’s a very good reason for it.” Miranda’s tone was wary, like a parent listening to their child’s increasingly unsettling plan involving expensive paint and their new furniture. “Why are you suddenly so interested?” 

“Well, apparently the Alliance has been slacking on updating a nearby planet’s quarantine tag. I’m not an expert, but I know the Alliance usually sweeps by a quarantined sector pretty regularly to see how the situation is and updating with any necessary information, but this one’s been left for…” She opened the tab and scanned the planet summary, grimacing as the description went from general information to hell in a handbasket in a few short sentences. It was a highly primitive civilization and riddled with easily communicable diseases, as a result it carried a relatively low population, meaning any chances of the native people achieving spaceflight were essentially zero, but that wasn’t exactly shocking. What was shocking was the fact the quarantine had been left after the initial designation and nobody had thought to fucking check back on the native people. 

“Twenty-five years.” Miranda spun in her chair and looked at the read out, flipping her hair over one shoulder as she stood. 

“I’m sorry?” 

“It’s what the summary says. ‘This planet is inhabited by a series of semi-intelligent, reactionarily violent species but due to the presence of a highly infectious disease Alliance landing party 4790-ARU has decided to designate this planet as a Level 5 quarantine’. Signed by Landing Party Lead John Brown, March 2160.” 

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. One disease and an entire planet of people has been shut off from aid since the start of the Alliance. I don’t even know how a landing party got out this far.” 

“It was probably a discreet exploratory vessel, the Alliance had a number of undocumented ships- “Miranda paused when Mordin made his way into the office, her eyes flicking to Shepard for an explanation as to why her office was becoming a trampling ground. 

“You called?” Shepard nodded and motioned to one of the seats, ignoring Miranda’s small sigh of frustration behind her. Mordin, as usual, forwent the seat, but seemed to appreciate the offer with a rapid blink of his large eyes, crossing over to look at the planetary scan quickly. 

“Level 5 quarantined planet, disease and violent population. Landing inadvisable and contact prohibited, why the interest?” 

“The quarantine has been active for 25 years with no updates. It’s a disease-based lockdown which means they’ve been left to deal with what sounds like a pretty nasty communicable disease all by themselves. Obviously with the primitive population the Alliance couldn’t just drop down and hand out omni gel to deal with it, but it doesn’t make any sense why it hasn’t been updated.” Mordin cocked his head to the side and began flicking through the planetary scan’s readings, his eyes flickering from image to image as he categorized the data. Every so often he would pause to look at a reading closer before flicking it away and moving on, pulling in a quick breath. 

“Geth space, dangerous to traverse and costly. Communicable disease also a tricky problem, primitive and violent lifeforms even more so. Standard Alliance protocol to check on quarantine regularly, yes?” EDI answered before Shepard could, her illuminated node flashing to life as she spoke through the main speakers. 

_‘Alliance protocol regarding quarantines demands a once monthly to once yearly check of the sector in question to update logs. No special provision has been placed on T1-13D45 to override this protocol, and it seems that any update request has been waived due to the Geth conflict and increasing damages that would be risked by exploratory vessels being sent to the planet’s surface.’_ Mordin jerked his head in a small nod and flicked back through the readouts, frowning. 

“Would advise sending probe. Need new samples, no, want new samples to study.” 

“Of the disease? Or everything?”

“Anything, but disease is preferable.” Miranda shot Shepard a glare and shook her head. 

“No, we are not bringing highly contagious disease material on board to study, and we are not expending a probe to potentially infect not only our equipment, but the entire ship.” 

“Then what do we do?” She shrugged, dropping back into her seat. 

“Nothing, this planet is clearly too far gone to do anything but potentially mourn the loss of a population that never got its feet off the ground. If the disease is serious enough to warrant a no-land, no-contact quarantine then its best we follow that advisory and expend our energy elsewhere.” Shepard motioned to the scans, Mordin completely uninterested in the argument as he poked around the smaller bits of data from the map. 

“We don’t know that the planet is still infected; it’s been 25 years, that’s more than enough time to combat an illness and it’s enough to warrant a small checkup if it hasn’t gone away yet. The plagues didn’t last 25 years.”

“The plagues were a problem in the first place because rats snuck onto ships and travelled to other countries.” 

“I-okay, fair point. How about I send a probe and I buy one out of pocket the next time we’re on the Citadel, yeah?” 

“That still doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the disease could spread regardless of containment, or that it might be airborne, or spore based. I can’t stop you from making this decision, but I strongly recommend against it.” With that final word and a seeming acknowledgement that her office had been commandeered, Miranda swept out, carrying a datapad under one arm as she went to search for a new area to conduct her work. Once the door slid shut Mordin straightened again and expanded the scan for Shepard to see. 

“Pathogen may be bloodborne, soil samples seem to indicate the topsoil was saturated with blood of various species that all carry the same strain of illness. Other possibility, population all had common cold when they died horrifically.” 

“Can you identify what the illness is from the sample?”

“No, too degraded even from initial scan. Saturated topsoil likely very old when collected and only bare amount of DNA available. Making assumption based on stagnant bacteria cultures, very unreliable source.” Shepard nodded and looked over the planetary scan again, the muscles in her jaw jumping as she fought the urge to grind her teeth in frustration. Everything about this planet seemed to scream ‘don’t touch me’, but the fact that it had a population, semi-intelligent or not, that had been left to fend off a possibly preventable disease due to its unfortunate proximity to a completely unrelated conflict made her angry. 

“Would you be willing to do a field examination?” Mordin blinked quickly and scratched at his chin, pacing for a short moment before fixing his attention back on her. 

“Potentially dangerous, but lower risk of spreading disease to crew and would not expend probe. Would be willing if accompanied by small landing party. Would recommend humanoid crew only, uniform physical shape facilitates a calmer first contact should it arise.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Get three hazmat suits ready in medical, I need to find someone else crazy enough to land with us.”

“Would suggest Krios, has required physical form, wide breadth of skill, and emotional attachment required to go “wherever you go”.” The little air quotes he made with his fingers were perhaps more demeaning than the tacit admission she was, in fact, involved with a crew member. All she could be thankful for was that it least it hadn’t been in front of Kelly. 

“Thanks, Mordin.” He smiled, nodding and switching off the readout before speeding out of the office, leaving her to figure out how best to convince anyone, including Thane, to come with her to an infectious planet.


	2. Tah : Two

As it turned out, Thane had heard from Garrus, who heard from Gardner, who overheard Miranda grumbling about the whole situation as she passed through the mess like a hurricane with perfect curls. So, when Shepard approached the Life Support control room he barely allowed her the chance to not so casually wind up to the ‘will you once again risk your life for my insane ventures’ conversation and immediately skipped to the part where he told her yes and assured her a hazmat sealed suit would protect him from potential aggravators for his condition. All in all, the whole thing lasted maybe twenty minutes, and then Shepard found herself in medical accompanied by Thane while they tugged on the first of four sealed layers for the hazmat gear. EDI had taken it upon herself to let Joker know about their new destination, which meant by the time they were done gearing up they’d be ready for drop off. She sucked in her stomach and peeled the skin-tight protective suit up to her ribcage and then letting the air whoosh out so she could flatten her chest enough to get the god-awful suit to her underarms, wiggling her arms into the sleeves with a loud grunt. Thane was only slightly more dignified, though his face still went through a series of complicated emotions as he pried his suit into place. Once the first layers were on the rest seemed to go smoother, a thin antiseptic gel lined suit slotting into place under the basic armor padding and then finally the generic light grey and red hazmat armor plate over top. By the time they finished Shepard’s arms burned and she could hear the faint labor in Thane’s breathing, Mordin seeming to be the only one not entirely put out by the workout. Then again, he didn’t have the same obstacle of fatty curves and muscle to navigate a perpetually tight suit around. Mordin poked at his omnitool for a moment before straightening, smiling widely.

“Sealing suits in three, breathe in and hold to avoid over-compression.” Shepard did as she was told, barely getting enough time to comply before a loud burst of air erupted under her jaw, the suit clipping into place and pressing down to block out any chance of contamination until she was, for lack of a better comparison, cosplaying as a quarian without the fancy systems attached. After compression she did a quick check of her mobility and grabbed her helmet, tucking it under one arm as she waited for Mordin to finish packing his analysis kit. The whole thing weighed less than three pounds, but carried equipment worth more than some of her weapons combined, a quick thumbs up from Mordin giving her the go ahead to lead their little party towards the lander in preparation for exploration. 

“We’ll be keeping to suit only comms for now, make sure speakers are off until we actually make contact. No reason to be drawing attention by talking or making a whole lot of noise.”

_‘Shepard, you are cleared for landing despite Miss Lawson’s misgivings. I would advise apologizing to her upon your return.’_

“Already planning on it. Any read on the weather where we’re landing?”

 _‘The average temperature will likely be low given the elevation and landscape recorded on the quarantine notes, however based on the atmospheric conditions it may be wildly different. Be prepared for heavy snow.’_

“Wonderful, keep us up to date if a freak storm is on its way.” 

_‘Naturally, Commander. Initiating take off in one minute.’_ The lander’s thrusters flared loudly as she clamped the safety bar over her chest, the gradually building momentum making the cabin of the lander vibrate at a gradually increased frequency until there was a low beep and they were thrust off the Normandy and into peri-atmospheric space. Shepard braced and set her head against the back of the seat, breathing out to combat the dropping sensation in her stomach rising into her throat as they hit entry velocity. EDI’s voice filled the inside of her helmet, slightly distorted by the initial interference of their entry. 

_‘Entering atmosphere, QEC will reconnect in ten minutes.’_ She craned her neck to the right to look at Thane, who had already put his helmet on and was, for the moment, seemingly meditating for the adventure ahead. It took less than a moment for her to reach over and squeeze his hand before withdrawing to leave him to his thoughts, the lander jerking as they broke through and passed into the thick clouds, the sound of rain slamming into the lander filling the compartment. Mordin was singularly interested in the window to his left, typing out his initial observations as they slowed and curved into a more horizontal flight path, finally making their descent at a gentler pace than they had started. Once Shepard had caught her breath she sighed and tapped her omnitool to open suit communications. 

“Testing suit communications, sound off.”

“Krios present Commander.”

“Solus present Commander.” She nodded approvingly, grunting when the lander decelerated and sent her stomach flipping back into her throat. Finally, after ten minutes of deceleration and pressurizing, they were free to roam the cabin, Shepard immediately smacking the release on her chest bar to stand and get a better look at their surroundings. What met her was a wasteland, a green one, but a wasteland, nonetheless. There were several unsettlingly familiar trees and land formations that reminded her of old holovids of Earth, but it was littered with signs of strife in its many forms. Most prominent were the swathes of burned ground and grass and while it seemed the markings were old, they carried long stripes of an unnatural red glow as if they were still hot. 

“Testing comm connection to Normandy bridge, please respond.” After a pause Joker’s voice filled her ear, the faint beeping of the cockpit in the background.

‘Heard, Commander. How’s the quarantined world looking?’

“Like somebody carpet bombed it. We’ve got visual on burnt earth, looks like a battle or something happened recently.”

‘A battle? I thought the planet had semi-intelligent inhabitants.’

“Semi intelligent only means they can’t speak or communicate complex ideas in an established written language. Octopi have wars, but we don’t talk to them.” 

‘I guess that’s true. Try not to get stabbed by a stick.’

“Don’t tell me how to live my life. Touching down in a moment” She sighed and brought her omnitool to life, creating a compressed file for the video feed once they hit dirt. The lander jerked again as they veered down to the ground, everything going silent as the thrusters cut off. Once she was sure the others were ready, she hit the release on the door, scanning the area as she stepped out onto the burnt grass beneath the lander. At first blush the area was almost idyllic, rolling green plains with lush pine-like trees growing in abundance, like a photo of old Earth before the massive expansion of urban areas. But at a second glance Shepard could see the imperfections, most notably being the number of corpses laying curled, dried, and burned; their vaguely humanoid or bipedal shapes littered across the area in between the ruined topsoil. The strips, which she had initially assumed were still hot, did not smoke at all, and had strangely pulsing red crystals jutting up from the surface, some standing at least eight feet tall and a few feet wide. Her initial, and entirely unprofessional, guess was that either the crystals were a native mineral substance, or the crystals were an invasive species that potentially spread the disease. 

_‘Ground team, I would like to advise you not to touch anything in the immediate area. Initial energy scans indicate much of the surrounding area is resonating on a strange frequency that may be a form of radiation.’_

“Noted EDI; Mordin, go ahead and start collecting.” Mordin nodded and hurried out, pausing from time to time to scan one of the unfortunate figures before moving on, his muttering coming over the comms as Shepard and Thane trailed behind him. Everything about their surroundings screamed ‘battlefield’ the longer she looked around, and it seemed Thane had the same sense of the situation based on his careful footsteps and cursory glances at the corpses, which Shepard dearly hoped wouldn’t start walking any time soon. The absence of the sound of any avian species made things even more unsettling the longer they walked, her hand drifting towards her Carnifex each time she heard movement, even though she knew it was only Thane beside her.

“Are you picking anything up, Thane?”

“No. But I would assume that if it is this quiet something will have heard us approach. The landers are not discreet.”

“I was thinking the same.” Mordin waved to them from his spot a few meters ahead, catching their attention easily in the eerie silence. Shepard made her way over quickly, ignoring the crawling feeling under her skin as she stepped around the burnt bodies.

“Getting anything good?”

“Readings confirm unknown pathogen strain present in multiple individuals, however, not most interesting result.” He showed her his omnitool, motioning to what looked like a genetic comparison. “Multiple corpses have markers of DNA very close to human. Current individual carried high levels of melanin in phenotypic receptors and chromosomal markers indicate a comparable male sex.” Shepard felt her throat go dry as she looked over the results, the small spinning DNA helix in the corner of the screen feeling more like an accusation the longer she stared at the all too familiar, and all too similar, composite scan of a chromosomal array. “Individual also has markers for potentially developing arthritis and osteoporosis later in life, likely due to low calcium diet or vitamin absorption deficiency.”

“How similar of a genome?”

“Entirely plausible individual on this planet and individual on Earth could mate and have viable offspring.”

“That’s not entirely impossible with any of us, Mordin.” He nodded, motioning between himself, Shepard, and Thane quickly.

“Correct, but no cross breed between our species would carry fully human appearance. Hypothetical coupling between you and current individual would be human on phenotypic and genotypic level. Offspring may have capacity for biotics if skull measurements gives correct approximation of brain size.” In the absence of a response Mordin bowled forwards, motioning to the corpse on the ground enthusiastically. “Corpse also shows signs of natural mummification, complete loss of internal organs and fluids, only genetic material present in remaining bone. Based on basic weather conditions of surroundings can assume body has been here for very long time.”

“How long are we talking?”

“More than a thousand years.” Whatever Shepard had been expecting, it wasn’t that; her lungs spasming for a moment as she tried to reconcile Mordin’s answer. “Scarcity of trees and long bladed grass type suggest surrounding area can achieve deep freeze temperatures but no consistent thaw, impacting decomposition for 70% of seasonal cycle and maintaining condition of remains. Closest equivalent would be Ötzi iceman, from Earth.”

“The fact everything is green now makes me think we’re standing in the only thaw period.”

 _‘My barometric readings suggest you are in a season close to spring, the ambient temperature is still quite low for a springtime thaw, but it was enough to melt a significant amount of snow. However, based on the cloud coverage it is safe to assume snowfall will happen at night and temperatures will likely drop below -10 degrees Celsius.’_

“Has that had any impact on the spread of the pathogen?”

“No, all markers are indicating a bloodborne...bear.” Shepard took longer than she wanted to admit to understand what Mordin was saying, confusion snapping into alarm when she heard something roar behind her, whipping around to see an honest to god bear standing not twenty feet away from them. It was a hulking thing, dark brown fur and massive shoulders with…spikes? Her stomach dropped out when she saw the spikes were accompanied by swathes of rotted flesh peeling off the bear’s form, its jaw hanging loose and dribbling frothy spittle down into the grass. It was a very ill, and very rabid, creature, and for a moment she hoped the only reason it had such a terrible appearance was because it was infected and not because creatures on this planet were just fucking terrible all around. But, given her luck, this could be the nicest thing on the surface and they’d end up running into a cranky yahg-like crossbreed. Within moments of them being aware of the diseased bear and the bear realizing its prey had seen it, the bear had started stampeding towards them in an unnatural and hobbled sprint, its speed hardly impacted by the knotted limbs supporting its gnarled form. Shepard took a few steps to the left and pulled her shotgun out, pumping a shell into the frame before aiming it directly at the bear’s head, cringing when the bear howled and roared again as it closed the last few feet between them, the report of three separate firearms going off and sending the bear sliding to a dead stop. She was glad the suits didn’t allow for olfactory input when the thick black blood splattered across the visor of her helmet, her stomach squeezing in anticipation for the potential level of infectivity the tissue had. They stared at the creature in shock, weapons raised and ready for it to scramble up to its feet despite the fact it had very little of a head left. After a few moments of hesitation Mordin slowly approached the beast and scanned it, his quiet muttering slowing to a halt as he read over the results. 

“Ursus arctos, common brown bear with small variation in fur thickness and muscle density.” 

“I’m really not liking the similarities here…” 

_‘Commander, I would advise finding cover, life sign readings have increased exponentially following your landing and the more recent run in with wildlife.’_

“How many are coming up?”

 _‘Approximately 300 humanoid and larger figures, average body temperature across the group indicate they are running a high fever.’_ Shepard cursed and spun to scan the surrounding area, the lander sitting out in the open with...things crawling up from the ground and ambling out of the tree line. They weren’t human by a long shot, hunched backs and sharp teeth from what she could see at a distance, but they all looked as sick as EDI estimated. The greyish skin and gaping wounds were more than enough indication of that, but what made things worse was the fact they were effectively separated from the lander by a group crawling up from the earth, their horrid wheezing and growling rippling through the otherwise silent clearing. 

“Fuck me running, we need to get to higher ground. EDI, recall the lander and we’ll figure out a new pick up spot in a bit.”

 _‘Recalling lander, there is a series of rock ledges to your east that lead to a cave, I would suggest taking that path and taking advantage of the difficult terrain.’_ Shepard nodded and spared her breath for running, turning and starting a full tilt sprint towards the rock face EDI mentioned with Thane and Mordin following close behind, the screaming of the figures behind them growing louder and more horrific the further they got from them. The first arrow wasn’t really a surprise, but the closeness to Shepard’s left foot was enough to shock her despite knowing the primitive weapon would never penetrate her overshield. Accuracy with a primitive weapon was something to be admired and feared. Shepard slowed her momentum just enough to jump to the first ledge, grabbing the edge and hauling herself onto it as the lander finally took off, the low roar of the thrusters cutting through the screaming of the figures below. With each progressive ledge they mounted it seemed to put more distance between them and the figures, though Shepard was sure climbing wouldn’t hold them off for all that long if they were truly motivated to kill whatever had disturbed their planet. She turned and pulled Mordin up the last ledge, taking the barest moment to breathe before plunging into the cave, flicking on her helmet light with a vague gesture. The cavern was almost ten degrees cooler than the outside, the walls lined with faint trails of ice where water had seeped down into the soil. With only the barest lead on where they were going Shepard forged forwards, swapping to her Carnifex so she could aim and watch her omnitool at the same time. 

_‘The cavern extends several hundred meters into the rock face, you should have sufficient coverage to lose your pursuers.’_

“Any life?”

 _‘Nothing currently, I will continue scanning.’_ Shepard sighed and started a quick but cautious pace, picking over the uneven rocks and checking any dip or irregularity in the walls as they travelled deeper. A few strange looking mushrooms seemed to be the only consistent presence within the cavern, their soft blue glow offering a sort of pathway for them, leading them along the single tunnel like inanimate shepherds. Thane was the first to speak after several minutes of walking, the dark all but consuming them as they lost sight of the entrance of the cave. 

“I do not wish to be the bearer of bad news, Shepard, but Miranda did have a point about landing on a quarantined planet.”

“Yeah, I know. My curiosity is biting me in the ass again.” Mordin paused in front of her to scan another one of the mushrooms, making a noise somewhere between a hum and an ‘a-ha’ as he read out the results. 

“Curiosity not all bad, giving me chance to collect rare data. Mushrooms like armillaria gallica fungi strain on Earth. Possibly edible but carries dormant strand of pathogen.” 

“I really don’t like how similar most of this world is to Earth. Environment and biomes, I can understand, we have tons of planets like that now, but genomes and things as small as fungus is a little too similar for my tastes.” 

“Is it too convenient?”

“No, just weird a planet so far from Earth, with no outward capabilities of space flight, has not only a visually identifiable bear, but human-like individuals. And if the corpses are a thousand or so years old then we can rule out accidental human contact since humans weren’t even flying aircrafts a thousand years ago.” 

“Possible random genetic development led to human-like population before pathogen.” 

“It’s a whole lot of random chance to have mushrooms, bears, and humanoids all develop on the same planet and then have them genetically similar to Earth’s species.” 

_‘Commander, there is a life form approximately twenty meters ahead.’_ All three came to an immediate halt, Shepard drawing her Carnifex slowly. 

“Same from before?”

 _‘No.’_ It was very unlike EDI to have one word answers, which made Shepard far more nervous than she wanted to admit as she flicked the safety off her handgun and began to creep forward slowly. 

“Can you give me anything else?”

 _‘Not currently, please proceed with caution and attempt to achieve line of sight so I may offer more detailed information. Fifteen meters remaining.’_ The remainder of their walk was done in silence, both Thane and Mordin drawing their weapons shortly after Shepard did and providing flank cover as they followed EDI’s vague directions towards whatever was resting in the cavern. They rounded a strangely curved area of the tunnel and entered a wide cleared area of the caverns, the walls clearly artificially dug out and widened to accommodate the largest statue of a wolf Shepard had ever seen. The forms were simple, but clearly inspired by a wolf, the soft white-ish stone carrying faint tinges of green in the crevices of its surface where moisture and cool temperatures had facilitated moss or mold growth. Even stranger were the wrought metal sconces nailed into the earth to the right and left of its body, empty of flame but clearly designed to be lit to provide light to the chamber. She could barely hear her own breath as she looked over the statue in silent awe, realizing belatedly that the color and smoothness of the stone indicated it was made of marble, or another easily chiseled stone. And that kind of stone required fucking quarries to access if the geological composition of this world was the same as Earth. 

“EDI, where is the life form?”

 _‘The closest approximation indicates the figure is likely behind the statue, or underneath it.’_ Shepard grimaced and slowly crept towards the statue, forcing her footfalls to be as quiet as possible as she circled to the left, flicking off her headlamp to avoid startling whatever was potentially behind it. It was almost anticlimactic to find nothing but a large bundle of cloth and leathers, though that bundle resembled a person lying on the ground, a small bag crammed into one corner behind the statue while the figure’s shoulders slowly rose and fell. Shepard couldn’t make anything else out, but steeled herself and activated her omnitool’s medical scanner to provide EDI with a channel to assess the figure, watching as the readout slowly compiled a skeletal image. It looked human, if a little lanky and with some distorted proportions, but the base was still the same, minus the left arm, which halted just half way down the humerus. 

_‘Commander, the life form does not carry a strain of the pathogen.’_

“It’s healthy?”

 _‘He is healthy, yes. And awake, based on the cortisol levels in the brain.’_

“Shit.” Shepard backed away slowly, watching him feign sleep on the ground as she crept back away from the statue. It was unsettling enough that they were entirely wrong about the native species being semi-intelligent, but now one had managed to fake sleep well enough to get her within ten feet of his reach. 

“Any suggestions you two?”

“Would like to examine life form, comparative samples of healthy subject would provide invaluable data for understanding pathogen.” Shepard glanced at Thane, who simply dipped his head in agreement with Mordin’s statement. “Would also like to attempt communication with new species.”

“Alright, I’ll…uh, contact then.” Shepard hesitantly turned her helmet speaker on and pulled in a slow breath before speaking again, a curl of fear tightening in her stomach at the uncertainty of the situation. “If you can stand and come out, I’d appreciate it; we want to talk.” For a moment there was no response, or even a noise as the cavern remained unsettlingly silent, and then the cavern was filled with the sound of rustling cloth, a hooded head coming into view from behind the wolf statue and turning to face them. Shepard absolutely hated how the eyes were glowing under the dark of the hood, but she stayed outwardly resolute, keeping her arms at her side to convey peace with her body language. The figure remained behind the statue for a few moments longer before circling around slowly, walking with purpose and care until he was visible from head to foot near the tail of the statue. Shepard felt almost silly taking note of the figure’s clothes, which were heavily obscured by a dark, fur lined cloak that stretched from head to ankles, but there was some justification since she could see the faint glint of buckles and other metal components that further shoved the population into the ‘intelligent’ category. The figure raised a hand slowly, holding the palm outwards before letting it drop back to his side. 

“Andaran atish’an.” Shepard slowly returned the gesture, taking the chance to put her Carnifex away to free a hand for the purpose, her stomach dropping when the figure tilted his head curiously. “Salutason á vou? Shanedan? Atrast vala?”

“Are you trying to greet us?” He made a small noise, almost a hum, before taking another step forward, the glowing eyes flickering to Thane, and then Mordin, and pausing on Mordin. 

“Gr-eet?” The replication was strained, but his tone was somewhat correct, eyes flicking back to her before shifting to Mordin yet again. His interest seemed to be, for the moment, only the strange form of the armored Salarian, though she couldn’t see much in terms of body language with the cloak in the way. 

“Greet.” She tried to replicate the hand movement again, watching his eyes track her hand carefully. 

“Greet… Andaran atish’an.” 

“An-dahr-on ah-tee-shan?” He shook his head but made no attempt to correct her, placing a hand flat on his chest and patting it for emphasis. 

“Mal’hari Lavellan.” 

“Is that your name?” 

“Nayme?” She nodded, patting her chest in imitation.

“Commander Shepard.” 

“Komandar Sheperd. Nayme Komandar Sheperd?” He waved his hand again, looking to her to see if he was correct in assuming what she had said was a greeting. She shook her head, patting her chest. “Ah. Amelin; Nayme. Mal’hari Lavellan mir amelin.” Shepard was almost impressed with how well this Mal’hari was taking their contact, his eyes drifting from her every so often to look at the two other silent parties that had invaded his cavern. His height was something of a surprise, as was the general put together external image he presented despite the fact they could not see anything but his eyes in the dark. The silence stretched on for a moment too long before a howl filled the cavern, the figure tensing as they did, his gaze snapping to the tunnel behind them with a focus that was uncannily like a hunter. 

“Banallen thenal.” 

“Banallem? Is that what they are called?” 

“Danafelasem dunathe, ma myaen.” He turned and grabbed his bag from behind the statue swiftly, slinging several other objects over his shoulder before walking briskly back towards them, brazenly grabbing her wrist and pulling with a strength she did not expect. His voice was short, pronouncing each vowel and syllable clearly to make sure she understood despite their language barrier. 

“Ma myaen.”

“You want us to follow?” He tugged again, Shepard resisting the overwhelming urge to punch him and put some distance between them. She did get a glimpse at a thinner face underneath the hood as well as what looked like tattoos or facial markings of some kind. 

“Follow? Myaen?” He nodded, this time more enthusiastic as he dropped her arm and motioned towards a pathway that sat on the other end of the clearing. 

_‘Commander, the pathway indicated likely offers an exit from the caverns, for the sake of a positive first contact it is advisable to follow his lead.’_ She grimaced but nodded, pointing towards the path. 

“Lead.” Mal’hari nodded shortly and drew a small vial of something glowing and blue from somewhere underneath his cloak, shaking it vigorously before holding it aloft and heading down the pathway he had indicated. The light was weak, but it offered some guidance, Shepard and her team following in a loose flanking pattern behind their new companion. Shepard could barely make out the shapes of a long bow slung over Mal’hari’s shoulders, the wood polished and in a condition that belied the great care of its owner, her nerves ratchetting up further as she caught glimpses of tiny, intricate carvings along the grip of the bow. She subtly flicked off her suit speakers and mumbled into her mic, resisting the great urge to grind her teeth. 

“Did either of you understand what he said?” Thane shook his head subtly, Mordin mimicking the motion to her left. 

“No. Translation matrix identified multiple language bases but no direct translation possible.” 

“Great…EDI, start compiling a lexicon, we need to get a basic translation matrix up and running if we want to get anywhere with this guy.” 

_‘Lexicon already compiling. Written samples would be most useful but anything this Mal’hari says will be recorded and broken down to identify common sentence structures and conjugations.’_

“Thanks EDI…” Mal’hari suddenly took a sharp right, dragging them along a tiny hidden path that barely accommodated their forms before it let out into another large clearing, this one filled with dripping stalagmites, stalactites, and more of the glowing blue mushrooms. That, however, was not the most shocking part, it was the massive, golden gilded, twenty-foot-tall mirror snuggled comfortably between two very large stone supports. The glass was strange, not reflective, but warped and dark, seeming to shift slightly as she stared at it trying to comprehend its shapes. Mal’hari paused several feet from it, looking up at the mirror for a long moment of silence before reaching out with his hand and twisting his fingers in the air, a low thrumming filling the air. For one, wild, moment, Shepard could have sworn she saw a faint trail of light follow the gentle twisting of Mal’hari’s fingers in the air. 

“Dirthamenes ena’sa’lin.” With the last word the mirror flashed and came to life, the glass shifting to liquid and bright, bright blue light with ever shifting shapes and depth contained in the impossibly polished golden frame that held it, the cavern filling with the unnatural light as Mal’hari turned back to them and motioned towards the mirror quickly. “Eluvian eth’un inorteralas.” Shepard found herself hesitating, looking at the swirling mass and back at Mal’hari several times. 

“What is that?” Mal’hari’s shoulders dropped slightly, the sound of howling and screaming growing louder behind them. 

“Eth’un inorteralas, shem’el sathan.” 

_‘Shepard I would advise hurrying; the life forms are closing in and there is no further exit from the caverns.’_

“None?”

 _‘It would appear the caverns were utilized to hide this mirror and create a death trap for those who did not know the path, it would not be beneficial to stand ground and attempt to fight at this time.’_

“And you couldn’t have told me there wasn’t an exit five minutes ago?” 

_‘The frequencies the planet is radiating is causing significant obstruction to my ability to offer wide range and accurate scans. I am trying to create a solution but until then my capabilities are greatly handicapped.’_ She grimaced, rolling her shoulders and walking towards the mirror, trying to ignore the weight of Mal’hari’s hand on her shoulder as he walked alongside her with purpose towards the swirling depths of the mirror, pushing her along with him as they stepped _into_ the surface, white light searing through her visor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm using Project Elvhen for approximate translations of what the Inquisitor says, it's by no means perfect so if you guys catch a glaring error please let me know so I can correct it!
> 
> Salutason á vou? Shanedan? Atrast vala?: Greetings in Orlesian (i.e. google translate French), Qunlat, and Dwarvish respectively  
> Mal’hari Lavellan mir amelin: My name is Mal'hari Lavellan  
> Banallen thenal: The darkspawn have woken  
> Danafelasem dunathe, ma myaen: (They are) rotted living things, follow me.  
> Ma myaen: (You all) follow me  
> Dirthamenes ena’sa’lin: To Dirthamen's victory  
> Eluvian eth’un inorteralas: The Eluvian is a safe passage  
> Eth’un inorteralas, shem’el sathan: A safe passage, please hurry


	3. Tahn : Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A beefy chapter ahead, settle in for some high grade charades.  
> Translation is at the end! Thank you so much for reading and leaving kudos!

Shepard’s immediate reaction to finding solid ground on the other side of the mirror was shock, followed by a hefty dose of confusion as she took in the strangely warped, misty surroundings she found herself in. The sky, if it could be called that, was stark and white, devoid of a horizon other than the faded grey stone under her feet fading into the distance, a hazy white mist curling around her knees and obscuring large swathes of her peripherals in an unsettlingly thick, but temperature-less cloud. She could make out faint shapes in the mist, rounded obelisk in form but flat, which she assumed were other mirrors based on her one-time interaction with the one they’d just come through. And, of course, there was no sound other than the shuffling of feet on the flagstones. Shepard decided, then and there, she really didn’t like this place. She felt Mal’hari’s hand drop from her shoulder as he stepped forwards, turning to face them once the light from the mirror faded, seemingly signaling the pathway was shut. In the directionless light it was much easier to make out his features under the hood of the cloak he wore, dark copper skin and bright, unnaturally vibrant, green eyes staring at her with thin, intricate white lines arching across his brows, nose, cheeks, and down his chin and neck under the high collared shirt he wore. He was _human_ , in appearance and stature, give or take a few exaggerated features and proportions, and her stomach did a 10-point dive right into her pelvis at that acknowledgement. His mouth opened slightly, as if he was thinking of saying something before he reconsidered and instead dug into somewhere under his cloak again, producing a length of thin rope. He uncoiled it quickly and handed her an end, wrapping the length around her wrist twice before approaching Thane and Mordin, doing the same after a clear moment of hesitation after seeing their hands. He clutched the end and tugged on it gently, nodding to some vague direction in front of them. 

“Myaen, sathan.” With that he began leading them through the fog at a clipped pace, tugging them along like ducklings. Shepard immediately took notice of the faint weight at her ankles, something seeming to try to slow her progress through the fog and only adding to her apprehension about this plane, wherever they were. The absence of EDI’s observations in her ear did not go unnoticed, same with the faint beep of her omnitool telling her it had lost contact with all communications relays other than the local channel she and the other two were connected to. She immediately switched to the suit comms, belatedly realizing she was white-knuckling her grip on the rope. 

“Please tell me I’m not the only one feeling the weight?” Mordin was the first to speak, his quick steps right behind her. 

“Tugging sensation is present, also feeling sense of observation.”

“You think there’s a monster in here somewhere?”

“Or presence. Rope likely to keep us from straying or falling behind.” 

“Just what we need, a void and a monster that lives in it.” 

“At least he seems interested in keeping us alive, Shepard.” 

“One bonus in a whole pile of shit. The faster we get out of this place the happier I’ll be, if I’m honest.” 

“Agreed.” They lapsed into silence, Shepard finding herself increasingly dependent upon the pull of the rope in her hand as the tug at her ankles gradually crawled up her shins and thighs, the weight making her legs burn with each step she forced forwards. Her vision seemed to want to warp and blur every time she didn’t keep her focus on something directly in front of her, making her head throb in time with her quickening heartbeat. And then she started to hear voices. Faintly, at first, but still horrific, half whispering and half screaming in a litany of voices she didn’t understand and couldn’t identify but could _feel_ the intent of regardless. 

They all wanted her to stay.  
She felt herself want to stay.

They wanted her to rot.  
She felt herself want to rot. 

Shepard tasted panic rising in her throat like bile, constricting and weighing her down while her knuckles ached where she gripped the rope like a lifeline and yet she couldn’t bring herself out of the panic like she usually did. Breathing didn’t help, trying to ground herself using landmarks didn’t either, she couldn’t see well enough to identify anything. And yet she kept moving. Something was forcing her to move and she couldn’t remember what it was. Only that she didn’t want to trust it but had to. Someone said something to her, but she didn’t find her voice to respond, the words made no sense and her heart was pounding too loudly in her ears, like an ocean ripping her down into an undertow and slamming her into the sand. Words curled into the base of her skull in a caress of warmth, whispering in a promise of sweetness and peace with the poison of a dagger under her ribs. 

_Telanadas, lethallin. Banafelasa’i’ar’an._ She tasted iron, and was fairly certain she was screaming, or her ears were ringing so terribly she had no other auditory input but a high pitched shriek before something hit her helmet’s visor and her head jerked back, bouncing off something very hard. Shepard sucked in a breath and immediately lashed out with a fist, connecting with something that had give, likely a thigh or other body part, but it didn’t stop another wash of something hitting her and knocking her head back again. This time her vision cleared enough for her to realize she was having water dumped onto her, and that she was horizontal staring up at Mal’hari, who was clutching a bucket in his one hand. 

“Ma’then?” She sucked in another breath and choked out a sob, pushing herself upright until a hand grasped her bicep and pulled her up the rest of the way. Thane steadied her, somehow completely unshaken by the whole experience, or at least not as shaken as she was. 

“Can you speak?” 

“I-where-what happened?” 

“You started panicking. We had to carry you out.” 

“Did you hear-?” He shook his head, keeping a hand on her arm as she got her legs to cooperate and steady underneath her weight. 

“No. You kept repeating words, but we did not hear what you were hearing.”

“How long were we in that…place?”

“Less than half an hour, I think. You were panicking for most of the journey but the guide…seemed to think it would happen and was not surprised. He helped us pick you up and kept walking.” At that they both turned to look at Mal’hari, who was watching them with the same unsettlingly still posture and sharp gaze as he had met them with, eyes flickering between them as he tried to glean information from their outwardly silent conversation. Shepard could see a slightly dried, but clearly cared for courtyard behind him, with stone benches and a slowly warping gazebo-type structure wrapped with vines and various forms of greenery surrounding it and a dead fountain in the center. It was so strangely peaceful it threw her for yet another loop, everything about their current surroundings throwing more shit in the face of whoever decided this planet’s population was semi-intelligent. The curious part in her wanted to examine all of it, but Mal’hari stood between them and the grass, and it seemed that now that they were on, presumably, his turf, he was going to take complete control of the situation. After a moment he seemed to make up his mind and straightened, walking over to a small door to their left and opening it to reveal a closet, flicking the thick leather glove off his hand with a sharp jerk of his arm before reaching inside and grabbing three small bundles and tossing them to her and her companions. 

“Hima. Ma’julathe’banafelaslin.” He reached back and grabbed another before tugging the tie on his cloak and pulling it off by the hood, hanging it on a hook embedded in a nearby pillar where his quiver and bow had been stored. Underneath he wore an intricately designed uniform of some kind, constructed completely of what seemed to be waxed leather, the buckles all constructed to accommodate his amputation and the limited range of movement it afforded him. With a few quick tugs he stepped out of the leather suit and hung it up as well, his gaze flickering to them before going back to his current occupation. He proceeded to strip out of the undershirt and pants he wore, which were faintly stained with sweat and what looked to be dirt or oil from the leather layer, depositing them in the bucket quickly. Shepard wasn’t entirely aghast by the sudden, and apparently willing, nudity of the man before them, but the markings that had adorned his face were, in fact, a whole-body experience, curling down along his arms, spine, and even to the tops of his feet in the same thin white ink, or paint. She could make out hundreds of scars across his back and legs, sometimes thin and clearly incidental, but many were thick, long, and warped by healing and time, indicating a very rough, and violent, life. His arm was the worst, the jagged and overlapping scars around the stump extending past his shoulder and seeming to drain the color from his otherwise healthy-looking skin, as if the limb had died and festered long before it had been removed. Mal’hari clambered into the new set of clothes with a stunted grace, but he managed not to fall pulling on the trousers, turning to look at them as he sloppily knotted off the sleeve around his stump. Shepard had to force herself not to stare at his ears, which had an additional three to four inches on hers, clearly marking him as human-adjacent and not actually human, or at least based on galactic standards. The other startling thing was, now that he was wearing a shirt with a very low collar, it was apparent he had a very pronounced scar along the base of his throat, long healed, but still there as a badge of someone who had had their throat slit and survived. Something about that fact, given how primitive everything was around her, gave her chills. And she really wasn’t sure why. After a moment of consideration, and a small ear twitch, he motioned in imitation of changing his clothes. 

“Hima.” He then pointed at them, clearly indicating them as the next word. “Ma.” He finally motioned to himself, then tugging on his tunic and pants quickly. “Julathe.” The instruction was more than clear, and yet Shepard still hesitated, glancing at Thane and Mordin. 

“What do you think?” 

“He has shown…trust enough to undress first and remove himself of armor and weapons. Good faith would dictate we do the same. It should be safe to remove the suits for now, Mordin made an assessment based on the plant life that the oxygen content here is safe enough to breathe without filtration.” Instead of responding Mordin pressed the release on his suit and practically jumped out of most of his layers, though choosing to keep the sealed gel suit on, both Shepard and Thane sharing one more hesitant look before moving to do the same. The moment she made to remove her helmet Mal’hari surprised her by immediately turning his back on them, remaining steadfastly turned in the opposite direction as them until he was sure they were presentable again. She did take the only moment she had while his back was turned to check her omnitool, grimacing when she saw the same emergency message displayed across the screen as it searched for a QEC link to establish communication with the Normandy, which meant they were very far out from the established range, or at least had crossed into a place where the QEC couldn’t maintain a stable connection long enough. She sighed and quickly set up a looping message establishing their safety and current predicament, sending it to everyone on the Normandy regardless of rank in hopes of someone catching it if the QEC went back online for even a little bit. Once that was done she went about removing her layers as well, dumping the outer hard suit onto the ground and nudging it away from herself before taking off the boots and secondary mesh, leaving her sealed suit on as Mordin had. The shirt and pants she’d been given were, in a word, rustic looking, the tunic a simple pull over top with a single wooden button holding the collar in place. It was slightly larger than what she usually wore, and she ended up choosing to roll up the sleeves, the pants requiring a ridiculous amount of tightening before they even thought about staying on her hips, but eventually she found herself suitably covered, both Mordin and Thane looking as confused as she felt. In the absence of the sound of clothing rustling Mal’hari turned back to face them, his face remaining resolute despite the rapid flick of his gaze between the three creatures before him. Shepard was almost impressed by the fact he didn’t immediately scream and run when he settled on Mordin, though the small twitch in his jaw was enough to indicate he wasn’t totally comfortable with what he was seeing. After a moment he dipped his head and motioned to the pieces of their armor now laying on the ground, turning to grab what looked like a pair of large wooden tongs from inside the closet, handing them to her and pointing to the armor, then to a large tub filled with cloudy water that was tucked into the corner of the courtyard. 

“Rea’ma julathe.” She glanced at Mordin, who nodded quickly. 

“Suits and guns are waterproof, soaking will not damage inner lining.” Shepard noted the quick glance Mal’hari shot between the two of them when he heard Mordin’s voice, though she was certain he was more surprised that they understood each other despite the clear lingual difference. Despite this, she grabbed hold of the tongs with both hands and went about dropping the pieces of their armor into the tub, pushing them down into the water to fully submerge them, watching as the blood and gore caked onto the treated material quickly turned the water a very dark red. When she turned Mal’hari was watching her intently, though the usual predatory nature that she’d come to expect from men watching her from behind was not present. His eyes were trained on her, but they didn’t roam, in fact they remained locked on her face as she crossed back over to them and handed him the tongs. Were it not for the proximity between them she wouldn’t have caught the barely audible hum of thought Mal’hari let slip as he took the tongs and set them back in their place, his eyes flickering over them once again before he beckoned them with a hand and led them along the walkway of the courtyard, opening a door and directing them through to what seemed to be a tower, or an atrium. The dimness of the inside took Shepard a moment to adjust to, but when she finally managed to get her bearings she found herself standing in the center of a large circular room with very high walls that spiraled up for two levels, fresco style paintings adorning each panel with solid, colorful renditions of wolves, people, shields, and things she couldn’t identify off the top of her head. A desk sat in the center of the room with a high-backed chair pushed away, as if someone had been sitting there before getting up and never returning, its surface scattered with papers, a few books, and a strange stone tablet that carried a faint glow to it. A set of wooden scaffolding sat near one of the frescoes, long dried paint staining the ladder rungs, and on another section of the wall was a dusty red velvet chaise, a book lain over one arm to hold a place in its pages. Mal’hari kept leading them on, crossing the atrium and opening another door that led them into an honest to god throne room, the hall lined with long tables and iron sconces that held piles of cold ash. To their immediate left upon entering there was another table situated by a large empty fire place with what looked like playing cards on its surface next to a stack of papers and scrolls, ink wells and a feather quill placed delicately on top of another bound book. Shepard could feel her fingers itch with the desire to touch the paper for the simple pleasure of feeling the texture, but she kept her hands to herself, glancing at the other two as they took in their surroundings. Thane was resolute, but clearly interested in taking in and remembering everything he saw for later examination, while Mordin was blatantly and rapidly taking note of every inch of his surroundings, muttering his observations quietly. The whole place looked and felt as though there had been life and activity buzzing through it before it all suddenly vanished, books left open on tables and platters sitting empty and abandoned from meals long since cleared away, and at the head of it all sat a throne, a seat for someone very powerful, and very important, based solely on the sheer size and complexity of its design, the studded red fabric accented by a large gilded golden eye and what looked like swords arching out in a sunburst from the back of the throne. Mal’hari made a quick detour to gently pluck a few blank papers from the table to their left before continuing his quasi tour, leading them to a door across the room which lead to a long hallway, a part of the wall caved in from what seemed to be a structural collapse. At the end stood a pair of very large, very heavy wooden doors, which Mal’hari braced a shoulder against and shoved open with a quiet grunt once he tucked the paper under his left armpit. The room that met them was well lit and spacious, a long table settled at the center with three large pillars behind it, each marked with a separate gilded metal figurine. As was the case with the rest of the building the room looked frozen in time with papers, books, and map markers left in clearly incomplete positions, waiting to be picked up and used by whoever had abandoned them. Mal’hari sighed softly and slowly circled the table, staring down at the massive and intricate map stretched out on most of the table’s surface, which Shepard belatedly realized was a cross-section of a gigantic tree. After a moment of hesitation, he set the papers down and reached out, picking up each of the map markers and moving them off to the side like chess pieces, clearing the surface so they could see the full layout of the map unimpeded. He dragged his fingers over the surface of the map softly, looking at them intently to make sure they were paying attention. 

“Min’ea Thedas.” Shepard cleared her throat, pointing to the map.

“Min-eah Theydaas?” He shook his head, pinching the edge of the map between his fingers and jiggling it gently to indicate the paper. 

“Unvallasa’hren.” He placed his fingers over several of what looked to be runic letters at the top left of the map, pointing out each letter as he sounded them out slowly before motioning to the whole of the map’s contents. “Thedas.” Next, he pointed to a part on a mountain range, taking a small map marker from the line he had set aside and placing it there softly. Shepard tugged up her pants to keep them from falling, motioning to the marker and taking another chance at the language. 

“Min-eah…uh…here?” She motioned to the room around them, Mal’hari smiling faintly and nodding. 

“Min’ea Tarasyl'an Te'las. Suh-kai-huld.” He took another marker and placed it near the bottom right of the map, shrugging slightly before motioning to them and then himself and miming a meeting motion with his hand. “Hinterlands unvellir.” Shepard finally got over the remaining bits of shock and approached the table, looking over the runic language inked into the massive map. It was intricate, and detailed, thin lines bisecting the paper and running in all directions in what she assumed were roads, crossroads, and paths connecting the lands. What baffled her even more were the names attached to most of the things, or at least words, marking these little lines, establishing not only a well-known, but man-made network of passages to deliver people to their destinations. She reached out and pressed a finger to the place he had indicated last, looking back at Thane. 

“What was it he said when we were about to pass through the mirror? Eluvian something?” Thane’s eyes flickered for a moment before he slowly approached the table, standing just out of her reach to her left. 

“Eluvian eth’un inorteralas.” She nodded, looking back to Mal’hari, his gaze locked firmly on Thane for a good few seconds before he looked back to her. 

“Eluvian?” He reached out to grab a stick of charcoal from a case to his right, pulling one of the pages out and setting it near the center of the table so she could see, placing a heavy block of smooth marble at the top to hold it in place as he began drawing on one end of the paper. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but the curved shape was enough to get his point across, Shepard watching as he turned the paper around and drew the same thing on the other end, so two similar looking mirrors were facing each other. Once he finished, he messily tore the page in half and placed one mirror near the placeholder in the Hinterlands with the other where he had marked their current location, motioning at the considerable distance between them. After a moment he took the pieces and brought them together again, placing the marble chunk to hold them in place before drawing a pair of parallel lines between them, setting them back in their original places, looking to her silently.

“Connected? Eluvian connected?” She grabbed the papers and put them on top of one another, looking to him quickly. He seemed to struggle with an answer, but eventually nodded, his shoulders dropping slightly. 

“Koneckted?” He pinched two fingers together, looking to her for clarification. Once she nodded, he continued, motioning across the map. 

“Koneckted, saron. Eluvian ena saron. Eluvian ena ga’mahn.” After several moments he placed three more slips of paper on the table, motioning for Thane and Mordin to come closer before handing each of them a chunk of charcoal. It was almost surreal, to be holding something as tactile as a charcoal stick in her hands, the black smudging on her suit already activating some strange, primal urge to rub her hands all over something just to see the result. Mal’hari set a paper out in front of himself and quickly scribbled down a long series of rows of runes, flipping it so it was facing them before pointing to the first one. 

“Kohmon Tung. Aey.” He pointed to the next, looking back at them as he sounded out each rune. “Buh. Kay. Deuh. Eh. Feh. Geh. Huh. Ieh.” Shepard nodded quickly and went to write them down, pausing when he reached over and put a hand on her paper. “Mar gavem’vallas.” Once he seemed to think she understood he withdrew his hand and nodded, glancing over to watch as Mordin quickly began writing out the letters used in written Salarian. For a bizarre moment Shepard almost felt like she was back in school completing a quiz while the proctor watched their every move, quickly scribbling down the letters to the English alphabet despite her fingers wanting to reject the very motion of using a pencil. Mordin, unsurprisingly, was the first to finish, flipping his page around and sliding it over for Mal’hari to examine, his wide eyes watching the other man scan down the curling script. After a moment he slid the paper back and tapped the first letter. 

“Aey?” Shepard’s translator only picked up the garbled translation of the syllable Mordin provided him with, but Mal’hari seemed to understand it, or at least understand the correlation, quickly transcribing his own rune to equate the Salarian cuneiform, continuing on with each before setting the paper aside and looking to hers next, his eyebrows raising when he noted the incredible difference between an European lettering system and the Salarian structure. He motioned for her to begin reciting the letters, nodding along and making notes with each as he had done with Mordin’s, glancing between the two looking for similarities but ultimately relying on her interpretation to correctly connect his own language with hers. By the time he had completed Thane’s Shepard felt like her head was about to explode with the number of directions this contact was taking, so much so she almost missed the faint beep in her ear as her omni-tool reconnected to the QEC. She did not miss, however, the very loud, very insistent voice of Joker as he suddenly yelled at her through the in-ear comm. 

‘Shepard for the love of god please answer!’ She jumped, clapping a hand over her ear, both Thane and Mordin reacting similarly as they received the same loud notification in their respective auditory receptors. 

“OW! Shit, Joker, I’m fine. We’re safe, a little confused but we’re fine.” Mal’hari did not visibly jerk, but he did go very still as he listened to her talk, his strange ears _flicking_ downwards slightly in what she assumed was displeasure. 

‘Holy fuck, thank christ. You’ve been completely disconnected for almost an hour, where the hell did you go? How deep in the cave system did you get?’

“Not very deep, we ran into a native and he ended up taking us through this quantum portal thing and we ended up a few hundred miles away from where we landed.”

‘Wait, the natives have portals? I though you said they were-‘

“I know, but I’m pretty sure the landing party before us didn’t come into contact with who we contacted, because the sick ones are semi-intelligent…the healthy one I have standing right in front of me, I’m pretty sure, speaks several languages and is currently compiling a written lexicon of not only English, but also Salarian and Drell.” When she made eye contact with Mal’hari she knew she had lost some trust in him with the way his stance had changed, his eyes flicking between them rapidly and his free hand hidden behind the edge of the table in what she assumed was preparation to grab a weapon or something sharp in the event their one-sided conversation turned to violence. Thane was similarly tense, though his visage betrayed nothing but stoic interest in their host, one hand carefully fisted behind his back with the faintest bit of biotic energy beginning to collect, waiting for her signal. 

‘Woah. Okay, look, Miranda is about ready to send more people down there to look for you, do you want me to try and stall her or what?’ 

“No, get her on the comm, we need to figure out a game plan because this is way deeper than what we originally thought and I need, I mean NEED to get a translation matrix of this language as fast as possible.” 

‘You got it. EDI just picked up your guys’ coordinates, so we’ll be in the area soon.’

“Don’t even think of landing the ship. Send people in a lander and I’ll see if I can get this guy to show us an open area. Looks like we’re in a mountainous area by the feel of the elevation.” She heard Joker snort, the faint sounds of commotion in the background filling the momentary silence. 

‘I’m not that stupid, Commander. I only land on moons with Thresher Maws on them, you know that.’

“No sassing, pretty sure seeing a space ship would give this poor guy a heart attack.” 

‘Roger that, ETA is ten minutes. Who do you want landing?’

“Miranda, Jacob, and someone else from the medical team that’s human so Mordin has someone to help him. Wear sealed suits but no armor, no weapons, and bring five gallons of filtered water and basic foods like rice and fruit, nothing compound.” 

‘Heard, Commander.’ The connection clicked off, Shepard looking back to Mal’hari and grimacing at the look he squared her with. There was a universal language of mistrust; body language and atmosphere were very easy to read regardless of how foreign a body stood in the room with you, and in that moment she could feel the tense, potential energy gradually building in his stance from across the table, hand still hidden under the edge as he watched and waited. After a moment he seemed to relax just enough to raise his hand from underneath the table, palm out to show he had nothing before motioning to his ear, holding it like she had. 

“I-uh…friends? Friends speak?” She pointed to her ear, grimacing at the sheer impossibility of explaining long range communications to a man that likely didn’t know what plumbing was. After a moment of studying Mal’hari’s confused face she sighed and turned to Thane. 

“Go and stand by the wall, facing away from me, and turn on the speaker to your comm so he can hear me speak from across the room even though I’m whispering. Hopefully that’ll be enough to show him how we communicate without exposing too much technology.” He nodded and went to stand near one of the book cases, turning away from her as she looked back to Mal’hari. His confusion was plain, now, one ear tilted downwards and the other up as he looked at Thane’s back before looking to her once more. She made the decision to back towards the other side of the room, motioning for him to go towards where Thane was standing. The silence in the room was palpable as he looked from her to Thane, then to Mordin, and back again, tension rising in his shoulders before he seemed to take a breath and step back from the table, nodding once to show he was complying. Mal’hari crossed over to Thane in a few strides, and to Thane’s credit he remained steadfast even when the…man? (Alien? Woman? She really needed to stop assuming genders with new species, it’d eventually bite her in the ass.) When their host stood not two inches to his right, his lone arm remaining at his side. Shepard sighed and turned her back on him, lifting a hand to her ear to at least signal to Mal’hari she was using the same method as before, whispering into the throat mic attached to the under suit. 

“Mal’hari.” Despite not having the greatest hearing she managed to catch Thane’s omnitool amplifying her voice, and Mal’hari’s confused grunt as he heard his name, and more importantly, her voice coming from Thane’s arm. She turned back around, watching as Thane, graciously, allowed himself to be touched as Mal’hari held his arm in his only hand and looked at the orange, glowing panel that had now sprung from it, his eyes wide with shock, then confusion, then amazement, before he dropped Thane’s arm and crossed over to her, pointing at her arm with a tilt of his head. The question was clear, and she obliged him, activating her omnitool and presenting it for inspection as well, though this time he did not take her arm, only looking at the screen for a long moment before looking to her once more, impossibly bright green eyes boring into her with another unspoken question. 

“Omnitool. Communicate.”

“Omnee-tuul. Kommunikate.” He frowned, seeming to roll the words around on his tongue, suddenly raising his arm and pressing the fingers together like one would to mime a mouth, flapping them several times. “Kommunikate?” 

“Yes.” With that confirmation a whole new expression crossed his face, one that seemed universal when anyone had an ‘oh’ moment, his shoulders dropping slightly as several pieces seemed to fall into place around him. “Omnee-tuul kommunikate frunds.” Shepard nodded rapidly, pointing out the nearest stained-glass window, stressing the outside while looking at him. 

“Yes. Friends…uh…outside? Friends outside.” 

“Frunds unvellir? Frunds Suh-kai-huld unvellir?” Shepard had never felt the sense of accomplishment she did in that moment, nodding enthusiastically and barely restraining the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. 

“Yes. Yes.” Mal’hari’s face went through a series of conflicted emotions before he seemed to settle on determined, nodding once and crossing back over to the table to grab their used papers, stacking them messily before motioning for them to follow him out towards the main hall. Instead of taking them towards the other end of the hall where Shepard assumed the exit was, he led them to the door just behind the throne, shoving it open with a grunt and quickly leading them through the scaffolded section and up another set of stairs to a large landing, Shepard nearly gasping at the room that met her. It was a bedroom, but one of the largest she’d seen, with a wide bed covered in furs and thick blankets against one wall and a tall book case next to a desk with papers and books set over its surface, two massive balconies looking out over the mountains. A dresser sat near the bed, and that was where Mal’hari directed his focus, setting the papers on the bed before pulling a drawer open and yanking out three long, dark cloth…things, throwing them over his shoulder and bending to grab something else from another drawer. Once finished he crossed over to them and handed one dark thing to each, reaching out to help Shepard straighten the cloth before she realized what it was supposed to be. The cloak was soft and lined with what looked to be fur along the inside, faint dark stains marring the surface, but she couldn’t get a better view of it before Mal’hari tugged it around her shoulders and held it around her neck for her to tie, which she obliged dumbfoundedly. Thane and Mordin mimicked her example, Mal’hari barely sparing them a look before he yanked his shirt off with the speed of a man that had lived with an amputated limb for some time, replacing it with a much nicer shirt, quickly tucking it in and tightening the ties with a swift tug. He then grabbed his papers and was back down the stairs and out towards the hall, this time making for the other end of the hall where the double doors sat shut. As he yanked the cross bar away from the doors Shepard’s comm beeped again, this time a private call from Miranda. 

‘Hopefully you haven’t caught the plague yet, Shepard, we are idling over your coordinates looking for a suitable place to land.’

“No plague, we’re going out to meet you now. Is there any flat land?”

‘Very little, according to Joker. The lander should manage it, but it’ll take a little bit for EDI to calculate the coordinates. Payload consists of five pounds of rice, five gallons of water, two packages of dried dairy drink, three packages of dried vegetable stock, and every vaccine we have available since you apparently forgot that you and your landing crew all carry a litany of diseases that very well may kill the only living person on the planet.’ Shepard cursed loudly, which got Mal’hari to look back at her for a moment before he went back to his task, both Thane and Mordin looking at her with worry. ‘Yes, shit, Shepard. We’ll fix it when we land.’ 

“Thank you, Miranda, and when we figure all this shit out you can call a favor on me at any time. Literally any time.”

‘Careful, Shepard. From what I’ve heard a favor from Commander Shepard is worth a lot on the black market.’ Her smirk was audible, but quickly faded as she went back to her usual self. ‘Joker just found a spot to land, we’ll be there in two minutes. Prepare your friend for a flying saucer.’

“I’m pretty sure he’s seen weirder shit today than a flying saucer, but I’ll do what I can.” The line cut out, Mal’hari looking to her before shoving one of the doors open and giving them their first look out into the courtyard. The walls were coated with a thin dusting of snow and what looked to be some kind of fichus growths, bushes and grass somehow maintained at a manageable level, and amongst them sat a second building to the right with a ring made from a rudimentary wooden fence out in front, a few dummies made from sac cloth and hay sitting near one of the towers with long forgotten swords sitting, waiting to be used. To their left was a second level below the walkway, Shepard barely making out stables at the far wall and a barn, maybe, sitting next to it. Mal’hari seemed to catch her wonder and gave her a tired, but warm smile before starting down the stairs towards the main gates, keeping his papers clamped under his amputated arm, his shirt apparently fitted to cuff over the stump without needing to be tied. Shepard was suddenly glad for the cloak when the first real gust of mountain air hit them as they descended the steps, crisp winter air biting through the layers of the borrowed clothes and only barely halting at the under suit she wore. A hand closed on her wrist, solid but not restraining, Thane’s voice barely reaching her ear over the sound of rustling leaves. 

“He took a knife when he changed his shirt, siha.” She nodded, not risking trying to match an assassin’s whisper. “It is hidden at his navel where the tie holds the pants; he is likely expecting an ambush. I will alert you if he seems to be readying for an attack.” She twisted her arm to squeeze his hand for a moment before the contact vanished, Mal’hari seemingly unaware as he descended the last set of stairs and crossed over to the gates, slowing to stand several feet from the massive iron gate. After a moment of quiet he raised his hand and traced another symbol in the air with his finger, sighing. 

“Patentibus.” There was nothing, and then there was a loud groan, the chains at either side of the gate going taut before beginning to slowly crank upwards, dragging the iron gate from where it sat in the dirt, metal screeching against metal and age as it seemed to follow his command without any input from physical activity. Shepard grimaced as the sound dug into her ears without the usual protection of her helmet to dampen it, but she remained steadfast, watching the gate retract until the massive wooden doors were revealed, at which time Mal’hari stepped forward to remove the cross bar. It took him a solid minute to do, but he seemed confident in his ability to complete the task without aid, so none of them stepped forward, only approaching after he had bodily shoved one door ajar enough for all four of them to fit through. The moment they were outside the protection of the high walls the wind kicked up full force, whipping at their clothes and cloaks, Shepard infinitely glad she kept her hair cut to short, tight curls to avoid the issue Mal’hari now faced, the loose strands of his hair whipping into his face and ears as he turned to show them the long bridge leading towards the snow covered mountains. It was then she suddenly realized Mal’hari was essentially bare to the cold, and when she glanced down, she saw his fucking _bare feet_ planted on the stone, the wind tearing at the thin fabric of his shirt while he scanned the horizon for their friends. Before she could stop him from walking out further Mal’hari began the trek across the bridge, which she now realized was suspended over a massive crag in the mountain side, somehow still standing despite the ice, wind, and cold of its surroundings. The wind was too high for an exchange of words, at least not without screaming and risking a hemorrhoid, Shepard instead bearing down and patting around the back of the cloak for a hood as she followed him across the bridge. About half way across she heard the faint roar of the lander’s approach, and one glance at their host indicated he had absolutely heard it over the wind, his head snapping towards the sound and eyes narrowing as the white dot of the lander in the sky rapidly grew in size, until even Shepard could make out the small details of its body against the nearly white sky. Mal’hari took pause only long enough to watch the craft slowly descend into the snow at the end of the bridge before he continued his journey towards it, something about his posture shifting as they closed the last few meters between them and the lander. 

Once they were close the door opened with a hiss, Miranda, Jacob, and Doctor Chakwas stepping out to meet them with matching looks of surprise as a barefooted humanoid alien approached them with their Commander in tow behind him. He stopped just at the edge of the snow, glancing at her as she passed him and turned around just long enough to indicate he should stay put before she hurried over to the others. Miranda was the first to speak, her hair tied back in a tight ponytail to keep the wind from tangling it to high hell. 

“Well, you’re alive at least.”

“Yes, alive, wearing fur, and convinced that we just uncovered a thousand years’ worth of history in a single castle. Did Joker find a stable orbit?”

“He did. The complications with the QEC are being actively investigated but EDI seems to think there is no harmful radiation that it causing it, so it is likely another source. She’ll be keeping us updated while we do…whatever it is you’re planning on doing.” 

“For now, it’s just compiling a lexicon so we can get a translator running, then we actually talk to the guy to figure out what is going on. He, they, she, whatever they are, demonstrated knowledge of the illness and has safeguards against it, which is why our gear is missing, and they also seems to know…a lot in general. Very intelligent, and dangerous based on what Thane has been telling me.” Jacob perked up at that, glancing over her shoulder at Mal’hari with a carefully controlled face. 

“Have they made threats?” 

“No, but you can tell when they’re assessing threats. The ears kind of give it away.” All three shared a look but nodded, Jacob stepping back to grab the box of supplies they’d brought down from the Normandy as they turned back to face Mal’hari. He stood resolute in the cold, watching as it seemed to be his duty, with impossibly bright eyes and a face that betrayed nothing. 

Shepard caught herself wondering what exactly she had stepped into.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation:  
> Myaen, sathan: Follow, please  
> Telanadas, lethallin. Banafelasa’i’ar’an: Nothing is inevitable, my friend. Rot with us  
> Ma’then?: You awake?  
> Hima. Ma’julathe’banafelaslin: Change. Your clothes are infected (lit. bad blood)  
> Rea’ma julathe: Clean your clothes  
> Min’ea Thedas: This is Thedas  
> Unvallasa’hren: Map (lit. written leader)  
> Hinterlands unvellir: We met in the Hinterlands  
> Eluvian ena saron. Eluvian ena ga’mahn: The Eluvian are connected. The Eluvian are everywhere  
> Mar gavem’vallas: Your alphabet (lit. bitten writing)  
> Patentibus: Open (Tevene i.e. google translate Latin)
> 
> The words that have literal translation like infected and alphabet are my own guess at putting words together that make some sort of sense, feel free to correct me on those or anything in this list so that it better fits.


	4. Av : Word

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dialogue heavy chapter, but Shepard and Co are making progress! Thank you to everyone that has read, commented, and kudoed this story so far, it means a whole lot to me!

Thane was wary of their host the moment he managed to get the drop on Shepard by feigning sleep. Had they planned a little better he would have been the one to approach the statue, but in the heat of the chase and the unfamiliarity of the territory Shepard had taken the lead as she was wont to do. EDI’s alert that the figure was awake nearly set him on the offensive, body ready to move forward and pull Shepard away from an immediate threat. Feigning sleep to draw in a victim was a simple ploy, one that required very little beyond a physical preparation to snap up and attack, but it betrayed several things about the employer’s nature, abilities, and intentions. In this situation, the foremost issue was that this…Mal’hari had either known they were coming or was woken by them and decided to remain instead of fleeing as one would if they were afraid of being discovered. Which begged the question of whether this individual was, in fact, the lone healthy survivor of his people, or if he was simply the only one they had come across thus far. Furthermore, had he been expecting to meet someone by the statue in the caves? Or was he lying in wait for some unseen third party? His reaction to the lander had been undisturbed enough to indicate he may have seen them land the first time and gone to hide, or he was somehow acquainted with human-style landers from a previous encounter. Or, perhaps, the way of showing fear, astonishment, or other unprepared reactions was very different on this species’ face and body language despite the close resemblance to human forms. There were silvery grey hairs at his temples and along the hairline, faint, but present as a sign of advancing age, which meant he was at least old enough, if he followed the assumption that this species aged similarly to how humans did, to have been present around the time the landing party previous theirs had arrived. In short, there were too many questions about their host, and all the answers resided behind a language barrier that, hopefully, would be erased soon. It still did not dissuade Thane’s creeping suspicion this Mal’hari was collecting far more information about them than he let on or was setting a trap. A heavy gust of wind kicked up a wall of snow that threw itself over Shepard and the landing party, all four looking supremely unhappy with the circumstance as they approached the bridge, the doors the lander shutting slowly. Shepard shot him a glance, trying to be subtle about her flickered look to Mal’hari’s beltline as she approached him. He shook his head, taking note that Mal’hari’s ears twitched when relief crossed Shepard’s face. It was likely he knew they knew, which meant he was probably telegraphing very different emotions into his body language than what he was truly feeling. It was frustrating, but not an insurmountable obstacle. Thane simply added it to his observations to bequeath Shepard the next time they were alone, as he was sure Mordin was doing. Once Shepard was close enough to Mal’hari to speak with him without yelling she motioned to the three behind her, indicating Miranda first. 

“Uh, Mal’hari, name Miranda Lawson.” She indicated Jacob next. “Name Jacob Taylor.” And then Doctor Chakwas. “Name Doctor Karin Chakwas.” To his surprise she then turned and pointed to Mordin, waiting for Mal’hari to turn to face them. “Name Doctor Mordin Solus.” Something in his expression changed when she said Mordin’s name, but Thane could not decipher what it was before Shepard put the attention on him, a small apologetic look crossing her face when she did. “Name Thane Krios.” Mal’hari’s ears flicked upwards at that, his gaze lingering on Thane for a moment too long to be simple interest, a smile crossing his face before he fixed his attention on the newest three once again. 

“Andaran atish’an. Greet Commander Shepard friend.” Miranda was the only one that hid her surprise even slightly, the others’, including Shepard, eyes widening and mouths dropping open at the, what he assumed, near perfect English pronunciation. Their reaction was seemingly what Mal’hari was looking for, his head dipping in a slight bow before he looked to Shepard with a smile, the expression something Thane had learned was considered warm. Inviting, nonthreatening, and clearly an attempt to make them as relaxed as possible around him. On the outset Thane would assume anyone without his training would see it as a desperate attempt to be friendly, particularly by someone who, by all accounts, was very alone in this empty world. But the knife at his beltline gave him very little sympathy. Not when he did not know what madness looked like in the eyes of this species. Chakwas was the first to speak, her voice soft and nearly drowned out by the wind. 

“Goodness, they learned fast.” Shepard nodded, swallowing and glancing at him before looking to Chakwas. 

“Like I said, intelligent. Very intelligent.” Jacob, who had been squirming against the cold this entire time, finally piped up, doing his level best to avoid chattering his teeth as he spoke. 

“Maybe we could continue talking away from the wind? These haz-mat layers really don’t keep out the cold.” Mal’hari seemed to understand before Shepard turned to translate for him, beckoning them with his hand before turning and starting along the bridge once more, keeping his stump clamped down over the pages of their collective effort at translation. Thane thought it odd he did not stop to inspect the carrying case Jacob dragged behind him, adding it to the list of observations as he fell into step just behind Shepard, Miranda doing the same. It was not long before his comm beeped softly, indicating someone had opened a private channel, Miranda’s voice coming through his auditory processor despite the fact her mouth barely moved. 

“Shepard, I’m assuming you have your first contact recorded?” 

“Yes. Been recording since we landed, it was being stored on the omni-tool’s local banks after we dropped out of QEC range, but I think it’s constantly uploading to EDI’s banks now that we’re back in range.” 

“Do you know if it caught footage of when you went through the portal you mentioned?” 

“I haven’t checked the playback. When I asked, he sort of mimed that the portals, which are some weird kind of mirror, are openings into a pathway that connect places like where we landed and here. When we stepped through it was like a big…space, completely white, foggy, with flagstones on the ground.” 

“So, it was a constructed place.” 

“I guess? Mordin and Thane got a better look at it than I did, the fog and whatever else was in there sent me right into a panic attack.” Chakwas immediately responded to that, though she remained steadfast since she was in Mal’hari’s peripheral. 

“How severe?”

“I…uh…don’t remember a good half hour of the journey?” Chakwas clicked her tongue and shot Shepard a look that indicated she was next on the check-up list once they were inside. 

“Did they seem surprised it happened?” Mordin, finally, piped up, shaking his head quickly. 

“No, seemed as if Shepard’s reaction to portal-space was expected.” 

“How do you figure that?”

“Did not spend much time examining Shepard after collapse, instructed that we carry her and continued walking.” Shepard glanced back at him, searching for confirmation, which he offered with a small nod, reaching out to squeeze her wrist for the barest moment before withdrawing, watching as Mal’hari stepped into the grounds of the castle, everyone quieting and entering as well. The presence of grass seemed to be of some surprise to Jacob and Doctor Chakwas, their attention immediately split between marveling at the grass and the surrounding architecture as Mal’hari braced his shoulder against the door and pushed it shut once more, grunting as he pulled the cross bar back into its spot, effectively sealing the doors against possible intrusion. Or a rapid escape on their part. One glance at Miranda confirmed he was not the only one who made that assessment, their eyes meeting for a moment before she swept her gaze back over to Mal’hari, who was seemingly content to watch the new guests take in their surroundings. His smile was growing more unsettling the longer it remained on his face. Shepard quietly cleared her throat, which was effective enough in collecting the wandering attentions of her team, everyone turning back to the task at hand. Their host tilted his head slightly and motioned to the carrying case. 

“Bokks?” Jacob was the first to answer, miming eating before pointing to the wheeled case at his feet. 

“Food?” Mal’hari’s ears perked up at that, interest immediately piqued at the potential of something edible, as any mammal would be. At Shepard’s signal Jacob opened the case and held up one of the 2.5-pound bags of rice, sealed in an opaque silver package with the contents listed on the front along with the required nutritional information. He did not do very well at hiding his tension when Mal’hari approached to poke at the bag, shoulders rolling back slightly and legs widening in preparation for a possible tackle or grapple, though none came as their host squeezed the bag in one hand and seemed to recognize the texture, his brows lifting and eyes widening before he withdrew his hand. 

“Ma serannas, Jaykub Teelur.” Jacob didn’t have a chance to respond, Mal’hari already turning to look at Shepard again and beckoning her as he started the walk back to the main castle. “Myaen, sathan.” After a round of shared looks they followed Shepard’s lead, Miranda squeezing in to her left and leaning in to mutter something in her ear as they walked. The two shared a moment of silence before Shepard nodded, Miranda pulling up her omnitool and starting an unidentifiable program before hiding the projection once more. Their arrival to the inside of the castle was quite like the previous time, the new team staring in disbelief at the interior of the massive stone building while Mal’hari looked on in silent glee, his eyes crinkling up as he tracked their careful wandering throughout the main hall. He even chuckled, or made some gurgling noise in his throat, when Jacob realized he was tracking dirt over the stone with the carrying case and quickly dragged it back towards the door. Doctor Chakwas was the first to break out of her stupor, looking to Mal’hari and asking a question Thane was surprised no one else had. 

“Is this your home?” She mimed a house shape with her hands, Mal’hari’s eyes examining her hands for a moment before he nodded slowly, shrugging and awkwardly motioning around him as if to indicate something he couldn’t yet express. Thane could see the agitation rising, or at least tension in his shoulders, but before he could try and use words he knew they wouldn’t understand, Chakwas seemed to take control of the situation and looked back to Shepard.

“Have you established a baseline in communication? What yes, no, and other basic answers are in their language?” 

“We’ve got an alphabet, and some words but he- they’ve mostly been nodding and shaking their head to answer.” 

“Then we’ll need to start with that. A lexicon has to start somewhere, and we might as well give them the power to consent to medical procedures on top of starting on our ability to truly communicate.” Shepard immediately agreed, looking to their host and motioning to the papers trapped under his arm. Mal’hari understood the moment she did so, pulling the papers free and approaching just close enough to hand them to her, watching as she flipped through each until she found the one she had written on, showing it to Chakwas and then Miranda, Jacob carefully creeping up to get a look. He was apparently confident he could abandon the food he’d left by the door, taking more interest in the raw paper held in the Commander’s hand. Thane could understand the fascination with tactile objects, he himself had a few, scant few, real books hidden away on the Normandy, mostly religious texts written in old Rakhana script, but the feeling of paper under his fingers was a pleasant, unreasonably nostalgic sensation. Mordin had taken to wandering the hall, and while the movement caught their host’s attention, he made no move to stop Mordin, eyes lingering on his strange gait for a moment before returning to the group of humans assembled before him. Thane heard quiet mutterings about runes, and how the writing resembled the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and then on to potential logistics of piecing the written language out. Once or twice Shepard requested Mal’hari’s help with the pronunciation of the letters, which he dutifully provided without question. Jacob eventually lost interest and shuffled back towards him, an awkward silence stretching between them for a long moment before he craned his head to the side and muttered to Thane’s right side. 

“Did they lose their shit when you and Mordin showed your faces?” 

“No.” 

“Any ideas on why?”

“My assumption is that this individual is not only intelligent, but capable of basic diplomacy. They are cautious, but clearly willing to open channels of communication despite having multiple unknown entities within a space that is special to them, however they take measures to protect themself in the event we try to attack.” Jacob nodded, watching as Miranda took the paper and scanned the contents closely, tossing out question after question at their host, who seemed unfazed by her assertiveness. “Furthermore, they display significant fine motor skill regardless of the amputation, including tactics I am deeply familiar with. Part of that is hiding discomfort to avoid being compromised.” 

“You’re saying they’re an assassin.” He did not miss the slight dip in Jacob’s tone, and while his translator usually muddled the intricacies of human intonation it was significant enough, and he knew Jacob’s feelings on his profession enough, to know he was similarly displeased by the potential of having to deal with two wet workers, as it were. 

“It is very likely they have a similar martial ability, but how capable they are of employing it with one arm is yet to be determined.” Jacob bit out an agitated sigh but said nothing, shaking his head. 

“I really hope Shepard knows what she’s doing. We can’t waste a whole lot of time on this mess.” 

“I am sure whatever time we spend will be made up when we leave.” They lapsed into silence then, spectating the attempts at conversation as Mordin finally looped back around to the group, his case tucked under one arm. He barely emoted the quiet sense of elation he felt knowing Mordin had managed to sneak back into the garden to trade the cloak he’d been given for his research tools, the sealed case dripping slightly and dampening the edges of the tunic he’d been given. Thane noted the tension returning to Mal’hari’s shoulders as he continued cooperating with Miranda, eyes forward but ears flattening slightly as Mordin passed behind him on his way towards their little group. Thane pulled in a slow breath, forcing his lungs to accommodate the air he needed in preparation for a fight, but none came, Mal’hari letting Mordin pass behind him and showing no indication he knew what had transpired. Mordin blinked rapidly and pulled his face into a smile as he approached, eyes flickering between himself and Jacob as he finally came to a stop. 

“Communication work going smoothly?” Jacob shrugged, grunting out an affirmative beside him. 

“Seemingly. I’m surprised they haven’t started drooling all over Miranda yet.” 

“Might be too polite, turned around when Shepard was changing.” That didn’t seem to calm Jacob’s nerves, his brows dipping downwards as he frowned and shook his head.

“Too polite to drool still means they’re capable of drooling. I’ve seen too many politicians at work to think otherwise.” 

“True. On topic of drool, bedroom had collection of saliva on pillows. Also sleeping with or slept with someone who drools.” Thane decided not to latch onto the fact Mordin had gone so far as to re-enter the bedroom they had been taken to and instead focused on the assertion there may be more individuals within the castle they had not seen yet. And in an intimate relationship with their host. 

“Could you determine anything based on the saliva?”

“No. Second profile of saliva was degraded, too old to collect genetic information. More recent sample matching host was week old at minimum.” He nodded, filing that information away for later examination. “Last emission also week old.” Jacob groaned, rolling his head back and grimacing. 

“And I was so interested in the conversation, too.” Mordin showed no shame in what he had collected, even smiling as he waved a hand. 

“Genetic material very useful in determining DNA and chromosomal structure, also indicates species reproduces sexually in manner similar to humans, and that host is post-pubescent and of child-producing age.” 

“It’s still a little personal, and I don’t think anyone would appreciate having their…stuff picked up for examination.” Jacob tried to look to him for support, and while he agreed on a personal level, he understood the need for as much information as they could muster, and so he simply blinked and said nothing. 

“Technically counts as abandoned material, no legal ramification of collecting. Will apologize once translation established.” Thane heard a faint ‘you do you, man’ but Jacob conceded the point. “Also noted evidence of consistent cleaning and maintenance, very little dust on items and areas that do not seem in use.” 

“I honestly don’t get how one guy could just live in a place like this and not go completely off the wall. Just standing around as long as we have is unsettling.” 

“Insanity is still a possibility. It may not present itself in a way any of us are used to.” 

“That’s not reassuring, you realize.”

“It should not be.”

“Thanks.” The gratitude was flat, and Jacob soon left to try and join in on the other conversation, leaving him and Mordin to stand apart from the group. Mordin blinked rapidly and pulled up his omnitool, turning his back on Mal’hari to avoid catching his attention as he pulled up the scan Shepard had taken earlier. 

“Very interested to learn what happened to arm. Healing along cleaved bone indicates a clean cut but wounds on skin show significant trauma.” 

“It is possible they were infected and decided to remove the limb. Amputation to avoid further illness is common in primitive medicine.”

“Possible, would need bloodwork panel to confirm if antibodies are present. Would also need larger sample of active disease culture to determine if antibodies possible at all.” 

“You mentioned the mushrooms in the cave carried a dormant strain.” 

“Yes. Scanner only picked up traces of strain but was missing components that made the strain infective. Considered that to be indication of mutated spore-based disease, however mushrooms were not spore-reproductive species and would not transmit disease even if mutated to carry infection. Your breathing also steady throughout and shows no sign of respiratory symptoms beyond your current condition, ruling out airborne virus.” 

“Did you scan Shepard’s armor for the sample from the bear?” He shook his head, sighing disappointedly.

“Did not. Brine solution rendered samples unusable.” Thane nodded and watched as Mal’hari slowly, very slowly, shifted his stance, his hand coming up to grasp at the stump, knuckles going white as he squeezed down. For a moment there was clear pain written on his face, mouth pulled in and eyebrows drawn while he took in a silent breath and let it go, shoulders and chest deflating before he returned to his baseline expression and posture. Chakwas, Miranda, Shepard, and Jacob were too focused with their attempts to crack the language to notice, but that was why he was here. To notice the openings in the armor. 

“What was the concentration of salt in the water?”

“Almost 50/50. Water also remained at steady temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.”

“They must have left the castle very recently then.” 

“That is running theory.” He nodded, mostly to himself, and caught Shepard’s gaze, her dark eyes carrying more determination than unease now that she had a clear mission set for herself. Any trace of the listlessness from the portal-space was gone, and for that he was glad. 

_Shepard’s head lolled to the side. Once. Twice. Bouncing back each time with the insistence of a toddler that did not want to rest. Legs dragging against the unseen stone beneath them. Stumbling. Her voice hoarse over the comms, repeating words in a language that had no translation._

_‘Banafelasa’i’ar’an. Lethallin, banafelasa’i’ar’an.’ She falls and his heart leaps into his throat as if the two were seated on opposite sides of a scale. Helmet striking the ground, echoing in the expanse, sound bouncing off the shadowy mirrors placed haphazardly around them. All dark. The guide looms over Shepard, he does not touch, knowing they would strike, and bright green sears him through the fog._

_‘Veremaen, sathan.’ And somehow, he knows what he is supposed to do._

Thane blinked rapidly to shake himself from the memory, still holding Shepard’s gaze as she watched him for a moment, brows ticked upwards in a quiet show of concern. He shakes his head once, and when she tilts her head as if to ask a silent question he nods, knowing she had long since learned the signs of a solipsism. She responded with a nod of her own and dragged her gaze back to Mal’hari, Mordin humming quietly beside him. 

“Established silent communication sign of strong relationship.” 

“Yes.” Mordin’s smile expanded, large eyes brightening. 

“Will send educational materials about long term inter-species relationships. Very exciting read. Would like to know what you think over meal.” Thane fought very hard not to deflate at the prospect of more unoffensively colored fliers and gently worded documents, already laden with far too much clinical sexual advice from the eternally meddling scientist. He did not turn down the offer though, knowing he would only be badgered later about it when he could not escape, namely during routine medical visits. There was a sudden silence in the hall, so striking Thane tensed slightly, until he realized why. They had hit a roadblock on communication, all four staring at Mal’hari and Mal’hari staring back for a short span of time before he dropped his gaze, his shoulders rising with a deep breath until he let it out in a great huff. He held up a finger, silently asking for a moment before he turned and carefully stalked over to the table near the fireplace, eyes downcast as he stared at the simple array of items. Thane knew a writer’s space despite the lack of a proper desk, papers with inarticulate scribbles set aside from the fresh paper and a stack of books sitting to the right, one left open on a page for either reference or inspiration. A feather, the fine hollow tip stained with black where it had been dipped into a stain to act as ink, resting undisturbed on top of a small pot of that very stain. His movements were assured from the outside, but Thane could see the hesitance as he gently lifted each book from the pile and examined the spine where intricate golden lettering was pressed into the binding. He did not want to touch them, preferring to preserve a silent doll house of objects for an unknown purpose than to use things for his own needs. After two books he seemed to find what he was looking for and returned to Shepard and the group, holding it out with his jaw clenched. 

“Deckshunairy. Word…book.” Thane did not expect Miranda’s eyes to light up the way they did as she reached out to take the book, genuine interest and hunger for information crossing her features as she opened it and quickly scanned the section her thumb randomly chose. 

“Shepard, give me a few hours and I should be able to work through this.” 

“That’s all?”

“I’ll scan the pages and EDI can use the pronunciation database to read it and compare to what you have on your omnitool. Her algorithm will pick it up and we’ll have a basic translator ready by tomorrow at the latest.”

“That’s…EDI is that true?”

 _‘Yes, the grammatical structure I have compiled from your previous interactions will provide a stable enough base to begin approximating a correct translation matrix. I do not expect perfection, but it should suffice once a database of legible words is uploaded.’_

“Will you need them to provide translation for things?” 

_‘It would greatly increase the speed at which I compile the database if there is native help alongside Miss Lawson.’_ Doctor Chakwas suddenly spoke up, waving a hand as if she was warding off some errant thought or strand from her sight. 

“Before we do any of that I need to administer vaccinations. The longer they go unprotected from our petri dish of a group, the higher the chance they’ll get sick.” The pulled Shepard up short, her face twisting in to a grimace. 

“I have no idea how to broach that subject, the needles look like weapons and I don’t want to spook them.” 

“I will find a way, but that needs to come first so the antibodies can take effect. I don’t want us responsible for killing the only healthy one on the planet because of an easily preventable illness.” 

“Alright. If that’s the case…Miranda can start on scanning this into the database and you can do a full medical examination with Mordin, if they seem comfortable to let Mordin close. If not, I’ll stand in as your assistant.” Chakwas nodded in approval, Shepard letting Miranda take full control of the dictionary as she turned her attention back to their host, who had been observing their conversation silently. Thane saw his posture shift when he was once again the center of attention, shoulders rolling back to straighten his spine and appear dignified under Shepard’s gaze, something many individuals did when faced with THE Commander Shepard. After a moment of awkward fumbling she threw a thumbs-up and put on a half-smile. 

“Uhm ma serannas? Thank you?” Mal’hari smiled, nodding. 

“Sathem.” She nodded, searching for the right words for a moment before speaking again.

“You give word help?” Thane was surprised at the number of words they had covered in a short period of time, noting how Mal’hari seemed to immediately understand what she had said despite the rapid influx of new vocabulary. 

“Yes.” Shepard then pointed to Chakwas, chewing on her lip. 

“We give…uh…medicine help? Trade?” After a moment of blank stares from their host she put up a finger and turned to Chakwas, feigning coughing. Chakwas reached out and rubbed her back, participating in the awkward charade for as long as it took for Mal’hari to understand what was going on. And it took a few moments, his ears tipping up and dropping in quick jerks as he tried to piece together what they were showing him. 

“Give word help, take…mehdisin help?” 

“Yes. Trade.” He took another pause to consider before carefully nodding, both Chakwas and Shepard sharing a relieved look before she waved to Mordin, who hurried over with a smile. “Mordin help Chakwas give medicine help. Yes? No?” 

“…yes. Give medicine help now?” Shepard nodded, watching as Mal’hari glanced between them for a moment, his chest filling with another breath before he motioned to them as a group, then to the room around them. He struggled with the right words with a slight tilt to his head before seeming to give up on speaking and quickly wandered around the room in a few non-symmetrical loops. 

“Yes.” He then placed his hand on top of a plate on one of the tables and pushing it around on the surface, polished wood on wood scraping through the air loudly. “No.” He set the plate back where it had been originally and returned to his spot in front of the group, Shepard nodding quickly.

“Understood.” Mal’hari’s shoulders dropped, rolling his hand through the air to indicate they were free to go and turning his gaze to Mordin and Chakwas, who quickly discussed a place to take him for the examination and whisking him off with a gentle nudge on Chakwas’ part. Miranda immediately took a seat at the nearest table and flipped the dictionary open to the first page, pulling Jacob over to hold the book open while she started up her scanner. With nothing else to do Shepard turned to him, crossing over and letting out a deflating noise, her arms flopping to her sides as the professional persona fell away. 

“I don’t think any other first contact had this much charades.” 

“I’ve been told the Hanar-Drell contact was quite animated.” 

“Yeah, but they’re made of jelly.” He reached out and took one of Shepard’s hands in his own, gently pressing his thumbs into her palm to ease the tension building there. They shared a moment of silence before Shepard squeezed him back and pulled her hand away. 

“We need to search every nook and cranny of this place as fast as we can.” 

“Yes. Mordin accessed the bedroom again and found evidence our host does not, or did not, sleep alone recently enough that a second saliva sample was present in their bedroom.” She nodded, eyes flashing as she took in the information. “The grounds first, then?”

“Yes. EDI, tell Miranda where we are when she asks. I don’t want to interrupt.” 

_‘Understood Shepard.’_ She nudged him towards the doors and grunted as they pushed them open once more, the wood far heavier than Thane had anticipated. Once they managed to slip through Shepard hurried down the stairs, heading towards the far wall with the stables. The open air felt far less oppressive, whatever tension had wrapped itself into a knot within the castle walls left behind and allowing them a chance to finally recalibrate and straighten out their thoughts. Shepard tore through the distance rather rapidly, doing a cursory check of the corners of the barn attached to the stable before stepping in, Thane following close behind. It smelled heavily of hay, his face scrunching in involuntarily as the scent mingled with the faintest traces of feces and animals, though there was nothing interred in the stables and likely had not been in a very long time. A carved wooden bird-like creature on a rocking apparatus was set against one support beam, a table with carving implements and sketches on parchment littered over its surface and a worn stool sitting abandoned amongst the bales of fresh hay. Shepard pulled up her omnitool and took a picture of the items, scanning the rest of the area before crossing over to a large leather-bound book, left open on a random page and filled with intricate scrawling in hand-made rows. Without a functioning knowledge of the language its contents was effectively useless, but it was interesting enough that Shepard took a picture of it before moving on, her curiosity dragging her through the stables and back towards the stairs where a number of tents sat in a semi-circle with a long dead fire pit in the center. It wasn’t difficult to determine the use for the space once they located a pile of bloodied rags tucked into a large wooden basin, rolls of cloth and large saws set off on various tables and surfaces as a rudimentary surgery. There was also a distinct lack of bodies, decayed or otherwise, within the tents, each bed roll lying empty and vaguely stained from patients that were now missing. Once Shepard had taken photos of the spot, she moved up the stairs towards the second building across from the main castle, a large wooden structure with an impressive glass alcove on the second level. Upon entering they found themselves in a tavern, many tables and chairs sitting in random spots throughout with a large fireplace towering up through the center and supporting a set of stairs to the second landing. Silence in such a place was unsettling, their footsteps disturbing the graveyard quiet as they passed between tables towards the bar where several large barrels of drink sat waiting to be tapped. Mugs and plates were scattered across the bar, along with another small stack of books, and a stringed musical instrument leaned against the far wall. Thane noted a rather large seat propped against the far wall, facing the door with its own little side table and an equally large flagon resting on its surface, apparently modified to suit the hands and needs of an expanded individual. Shepard reached out and dragged a hand over the bar, her hand coming back free of dust or grime. They shared a look before she turned and took a panoramic shot of the room, heading to the second floor with a quiet grumble. They found more tables and several emptied bottles of nondescript beverage, the landing curving around and offering only a staircase to the third level or a dead-end in the form of the alcove. Shepard wandered around for a few moments before heading into the alcove, making a small noise of surprise as she scanned the area. It was a small room, barely enough space for two, let alone three or four grown people inside, and with a sitting space that was absolutely covered in brightly colored and patched pillows of incongruent sizes. Some had tassels, other were beaded and shimmered slightly in the colorful light cast by the stained-glass window, and some were simply solid, but none were plain. A small book shelf took the entirety of one wall and was messily filled with books and other knick-knacks, including a paper with a very crude drawing of a penis ejaculating over a scowling face with sharp protrusions along one side. Shepard caught sight of it around the time he did and snorted out a laugh, snapping a photo of the room and then of the paper before heading towards the last set of stairs. 

The third landing was clearly not part of the main tavern, and more of a walk way and storage area with one or two tables stacked in corners to accommodate particularly active nights. Shepard tested the wood under her feet, and upon finding it sturdy she began examining the various crates and boxes. Thane was surprised that she held so fast to their host’s request not to touch anything, her hands folded behind her back as she craned her neck over the boxes to look at their contents before snapping photos and scanning various items that were left out in the open. She scanned a cup on a small end table settled in the far corner of the building, a surreptitious void between it and a box filled to the brim with daggers.

“Huh…” 

“Something interesting?” 

“This cup has warm water and lemon in it.” Thane shifted his stance, placing weight on the balls of his feet to prepare for a possible attack. 

“Someone was here.” 

“Recently, because the DNA on the rim is brand fucking new. It contains epithelial cells from the mouth and cheeks along with traces of saliva. No match to Mal’hari.” She turned to show him the scan, Thane taking a cursory glance before scanning the area. They were fifty feet from the only doorway, which likely led out onto the wall based on how high up they were currently, and fleeing down stairs that had an unknown amount of rot was more of a death sentence than allowing themselves to be snuck up on. He couldn’t hear any movement and while it was dimly lit in the upper walk way he could still see into each corner clearly, and there was no one. Thane flicked his gaze up to the ceiling where the exposed rafters could house an assailant, his catalogue of locations coming to a halt when he saw a bird. Not just any bird, a bird in flight, leaping from one of the rafters and making to extend its wings, yet it was frozen in place, wings half unfurled and legs kicked out from its leap. 

“Thane, what did you see?” 

“A bird. Look up and to the right; the fourth rafter from the wall.” There was silence for a moment before Shepard sucked in a sharp gasp of air, the breath wooshing out of her lungs a moment later. 

“EDI is there any chance you could detect a stasis field?” 

_‘There is no conventional stasis field in effect, however the radiation I have been struggling to identify is ‘thinner’ here than where the ground team originally landed. It is possible there is a technology warding off the radiation from this particular location.’_

“Thinner? Radiation doesn’t thin out, it just lessens in concentration, right?” 

_‘Correct, however the radiation present on this planet does not have an emission source, it is a blanket more than a miasma, and this place is a worn spot in the blanket.’_

“That needs to go on our list of things Mal’hari needs to explain, if he knows anything about it. Is there any warding technology that puts a place in stasis?”

 _‘I have no record of such technology, but it is possible the people of this planet somehow achieved such a feat.’_

“Great…” Shepard shook her head and snapped a picture of the bird before recording it as well, doing a slow turnaround of it simply to display the fact it was frozen in time. She immediately started towards the door across the room, Thane following close behind to ensure they would not be separated while casting a last look over the area. In the void between the table and the crates now stood a human, frail and wearing a massive drooping hat, staring at them with sunken eyes as they left. Before he could alert Shepard, the figure was gone again, as if they had flickered out of existence, leaving him with a rush of adrenaline and nothing to use it on. 

A second later, he couldn’t remember why he had been startled, and that was perhaps the most terrifying feeling of all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation:  
> Veremaen, sathan: Pick (him/her/them) up, please  
> Sathem: Pleased to help, you're welcome
> 
> I swear the pseudo science will make sense eventually T_T


	5. Halani : Help

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Talk of medical procedures and needles in this chapter.   
> Thank you again to everyone that has read, kudoed, and commented! It means a lot to me :)

Shepard’s idea of landing on a quarantined planet was not a very well hatched one, Mordin had to admit. Usually he could rely on a captain to understand, or at least appreciate, the intricacies of a potential first contact situation, however Shepard had proved time and time again to simply not care and run head long into whatever fray sat in her path. Solutions came later, and usually while she was nursing a broken bone or concussion. Given that track record, it was no surprise the standing quarantine hadn’t scared her off. His recruitment on Omega had been more than enough indication she was singularly unimpressed by the threats mere illnesses posed, and with their current nemesis in the Collectors he was not inclined to think she ever would consider an illness a legitimate threat to her wellbeing. It smacked of the start of an invincibility complex, or a lack of consideration for personal wellbeing, but he was still unfamiliar enough with her that he could not settle on one diagnosis or the other. And he was not the Normandy’s resident psychologist, he only dabbled in the study. Though, the lingering diagnosis left him with a question about how well she would cope with the unavoidable eventuality of Sere Krios’ disease. It was something to investigate when they returned to the Normandy, if he had time amongst all the other demands he had on his platter. What was mildly surprising was their host’s willingness to not only allow ‘medicine help’, but to allow his participation in it despite being wholly non-humanoid in appearance. Sere Krios’ assessment of diplomatic skill was looking to be quite true. He split his attention between Dr. Chakwas and their charge, adjusting his hold on the research case under his arm. 

“Where is the most private place you’ve found?” 

“Master bedroom seemed to be place of familiarity and will give private space to work. Can lead you there, not far.” She nodded, their host’s gaze flicking from him to Dr. Chakwas and back again as they spoke. “Or would letting host lead be wiser?” 

“Likely wiser…affording them as much control as possible might make requesting things easier once we start pulling out sharp objects to stick them with.” He was inclined to agree with that, quickly nodding and looking to their host, letting Dr. Chakwas make the attempt at communication. “Ah, Mal’hari. We give medicine help…away?” She motioned away from herself to further demonstrate the point, their host’s ears shifting slightly as they worked to understand what was being said, twitching up and down in minute motions until seeming to settle on a flatter angle than before. Of what he had heard of Earth’s feline population, the angle was likely displaying distrust, displeasure, or discomfort. They did not, however, outright deny the request, instead nodding warily and casting their gaze around for a moment before motioning for them to follow, heading towards the doorway that led to the master bedroom. A glance over at the others was enough to determine they would not notice the exit, Miss Lawson already eyes deep in the book provided to her and Jacob intent on aiding her pursuit. Mordin remained close to Dr. Chakwas’ side as they took the path to the master bedroom, their combined footsteps almost too loud in the wide hall approaching the door at the end, Mordin supposing that, if it was intentional, the acoustics would make it very difficult for assassins to approach silently. Sere Krios would certainly find it troublesome when he inevitably snuck around the castle after dark. He made a note to warn him and passed through the door after Dr. Chakwas, nodding in thanks to Mal’hari for holding it open. He geared his attention to Mal’hari’s reaction as they crossed into the bedroom, watching the angle of their shoulders and ears while they subtly scanned the area. Their ears flicked down considerably when they noticed the shirt that had been left on the bed had been moved to the dresser, done by Mordin himself to scan the bed during his earlier exploration. There was no other reaction, Mal’hari clenching their jaw and forcing relaxation to seep back into their posture as Dr. Chakwas addressed them, motioning to their surroundings. 

“Name here?” They cocked their head to the side, considering their words before speaking.

“Behdruum. Mal’hari behdrumm.” The fact they claimed ownership of the space was not lost on either of them, Dr. Chakwas nodding and offering a smile. Their host mimicked the expression, but it was not genuine, their eyes flicking between their two guests, waiting for something, anything to happen. Dr. Chakwas went through a series of miming motions, eventually managing to get them access to a folding bedside table to be used for their examination as well as convincing their host to sit on the edge of the bed and remove their shirt. It was an impressive bit of work, he had to admit, and Dr. Chakwas maintained an atmosphere of calm throughout, which translated to a relative calm in their patient. He resolved to let Dr. Chakwas do the brunt of the communicative work, knowing that her more familiar visage would lend itself to a better understanding of physical movement as opposed to his own, relegating himself to being an assistant and taking the freedom of that role to do a deeper examination of the body that sat before them. He had theories about the markings that sat stark against Mal’hari’s skin, the long, delicate lines and sharp points uninterrupted by the many scars and lines that bisected the designs. They were too solid to be paint, and too vivid to simply be ritual scarification or tattooing, yet he had little faith this population had achieved holographic tattooing techniques as of yet given the absence of artificial light sources, which left the possibility of natural bioluminescence and nonverbal communicative measures, or the employment of the strange glowing substance he’d seen in the caverns as a medium of tattooing. That mystery did not even touch on what the significance of the markings were, if they symbolized some layer of royalty, holiness, devotion, or even criminality. He handed over a metal tongue depressor and a pair of sterile gloves when Dr. Chakwas requested, watching as she demonstrated the depressor’s use before silently requesting cooperation, examining their teeth and throat with surprising ease.

“Typical dentition of an adult human, tooth density is nominal with some decay from aging and normal consumption patterns. No acute signs of known gum disease or scurvy, there are markers of routine dental cleaning. Slight underbite and misalignment noted.” She reached over and collected a swab, rubbing it along one cheek before handing it off for him to scan, letting Mal’hari sit back as she sanitized the depressor. He dutifully scanned the cheek swab and waited for the results, finding an entirely familiar cellular break down as it filled his screen. There were all the normal components of a human mouth; saliva and its many smaller building blocks, basic bacteria cultures that maintained internal chemistry, and the faintest amount of food particle left over from the most recent meal, which seemed to be mostly plant based. He sent Dr. Chakwas the results and awaited his next task, idly looking over the basic DNA components that were made available to him through the saliva sample. It was directly related to one he’d found earlier, and carried a base genetic code he could extrapolate, which was incredibly helpful in finding out exactly where this species differed from the humans. The helix structure was the same, as were the four chemical bases and their impact on nucleotide structure. Moving larger, the chromosomal layout, of what cells he could access, seemed to suggest a mere phenotypical difference between human and this species, not a genotypical one. At that level they were no more than a human with altered proportions, which was a very interesting development, but not one that was entirely shocking. He glanced up at the proceedings, genuinely surprised to see Dr. Chakwas preparing for a blood draw, Mal’hari watching her movements very carefully with their arm outstretched. There was unease written in their body language, which was not at all uncommon amongst his own interactions with those getting their blood drawn, but what was intriguing was the level of attention Mal’hari paid to the supplies being set out. Their eyes lingered on the needles, familiarity mixed with confusion crossing their face as the item was identified, but likely being used for a purpose outside their usual understanding of its function. Dr. Chakwas carefully adjusted their arm and tied the tourniquet off, informing them of the possibility of pain before introducing the needle. Mordin was prepared for a retaliation with Dr. Chakwas so close, waiting for any sign of violence as the two vials were drawn and the needle was taken away. He handed over a bandage the moment he saw the draw was complete, collecting the vials and immediately placing them in the research case for storage and analysis. It was not hard to miss the near obsessive nature of Mal’hari’s gaze as he set the vials inside, their pupils retracting to pinpoints as they watched the vials recede, carefully clenching their fist to return feeling to their fingers when the tourniquet was removed. Dr. Chakwas went about disposing of the used materials before turning back to begin an overall physical examination, passing her scanner over Mal’hari once she’d given them some idea that it would not harm them. The more detailed medical scan was a blessing, Mordin looking over the layers while Dr. Chakwas started checking for any swelling or dormant signs of illness in the lymph nodes around Mal’hari’s neck and chest. 

As determined from Shepard’s scan, their skeletal structure was a near replica of the human one, save for slightly wider eye sockets and aural canals, and the joints seemed to have a thinner deposit of cartilage which facilitated a wider range of movement and flexibility. This lack of cartilage did not seem to impact the integrity of the bones at contact points or suggest a wide spread affliction of arthritis, but there were signs of advancing age in this individual’s system, a natural degradation only brought on by time and normal activity. He identified points of over-healing, places were bones had broken or fractured, including what looked to be a bum ankle that had a wide knot of rigid cartilage where the bones had popped out of place at some point. The foot bones were long and thicker than that of a human, even a professional runner, lending itself to barefoot travel as they had seen previous. Mal’hari’s remaining knuckles were thickened, and the forefinger was particularly knobbed from what seemed to be a natural adaptation to a life of handling bows and other projectile weapons, but it seemed they had been fortunate not to have suffered any breaks on that hand. The muscles, tendons, and ligaments were not remarkable, as were all the dermal layers, and he found no significant revelations aside from the lacking fat deposits within the muscles, suggesting an overall leaner construction than that of humans. He found hair formation patterns to be like a human, and the vascular and endocrine systems operated as he expected, so much so that he could readily identify the whole of the genital structure in a single glance, down to the smaller blood vessels and epididymis. The scanner identified no clots or inflammation, which at least simplified their endeavors, but otherwise he was disappointed. There was nothing particularly brand-new to be found beyond the genome currently being unlocked by the blood samples.

“Mordin, would you prepare the vaccines? I’m thinking we will administer them in the thigh to avoid taking away their only source of fine motor control.” 

“Full array?” She nodded, carefully prodding at Mal’hari’s ribs with her fingers, their gaze fixed somewhere off to the left as they tolerated the treatment. 

“Yes, along with the travel-mandatory batch. We might as well protect them against _everything_ that could possibly be floating around in our group.” He could not agree more, and set forth to do as he was asked, inputting the various commands into Dr. Chakwas’ medical case and awaiting its cooperation, a quiet buzzing filling the air as three syringes were filled with the correct concoction of fluids. It was quite the achievement when vaccinations were finally combined into two to three simple injections instead of the standard mountain of needles required to do the job, and given the current set of circumstances, he was more than happy to only risk three injections instead of twenty or more. There was only so much charity in a person who understood what was going on, and far less, he guessed, in one who was only allowing such treatment because there was no other option. He hummed and disconnected the syringes once they were filled, setting them aside for Dr. Chakwas and returning to his spot adjacent the bed, a flicker of movement catching in his, admittedly wide, peripheral. He did not immediately turn to look, instead casting his gaze up at the second landing where a mural of a sword, eye, and sunburst sat painted onto the stone, and then feigned interest in the ceiling, as if he’d suddenly noticed the vaulted structure. Near the bed stood another, a thin, spidery looking person with a wide hat wearing dark clothing and strange shoes. They were slouched, fussing with their hands and fidgeting in place, mouth moving but no sound reaching him. It was hard to focus on them for long, something about its nature encouraging him to look away, making him uneasy to settle on one aspect as if it was constantly deflecting notice, deflecting sight. He slowly dropped his gaze back towards Mal’hari, not looking directly at their sudden visitor, and offered a smile. The expression was not returned, their eyes lingering on him for a long moment before they looked away, fixing their gaze off to the side once more. Their right arm, once in their lap, extended out ever so slowly towards the creature, and the creature grasped at their hand tightly the moment it was within reach. Dr. Chakwas did not take notice, in fact she seemed so interested in the structure of Mal’hari’s ears that he was sure she had forgotten even he was in the room. Mordin cocked his head to the side and feigned interest in the mural again, forcing himself to focus and try, somehow, to hear what the creature was saying. It was garbled when it did finally come through, sounding frantic and fearful but calm all at once. There were catchings of words he might understand, things that sounded so like English, and yet so far from it he could only guess their value and meaning. What he did know, however, was that their host was not alone at all, and had somehow managed to hide a whole person from them. The nature of this person seemed to be human, the body and its compositional forms were humanoid, if frail and very pallid, and they had managed some approximation of invisibility by employing tactics that forced focus away from them. He tamped down a smile that threatened to break onto his face, the excitement of a new discovery, a discovery he likely wasn’t supposed to make at that, was very exciting. The hushed speaking stopped, Mal’hari’s friend clinging to their hand in a desperate grasp, and he noticed Mal’hari’s pupils dilate, turning the unnatural bright green to black. Mordin watched in his peripheral as their expression went slack, something he could only equate to watching someone go through the Melding, and then they snapped back to normal with a small breath inwards and a rapid set of blinks. Mal’hari glanced to their friend and offered a single nod, and when the friend spoke again, they zeroed in on him. 

He had stood in the face of dangerous people many times. It was required when choosing a profession of medicine and research, particularly the research of diseases and afflictions that some may have a vested interest in keeping incurable. Mal’hari was adept at making themself intimidating with a simple shift of posture and a locking of gazes, and he commended them on actually inspiring wariness in him. They cocked their head to the side slightly, watching him for any indication of his feelings on the matter. Silently goading him to take issue. For a moment he simply stared back, and then slowly smiled and raised a hand to press a finger against his lips, opting to use the universal sign for ‘silence’ to get his point across. Mal’hari seemed to search his face for a moment before nodding and sitting back, listening to the flurry of nervous words directed at them and minutely squeezing their friend’s hands in response. Dr. Chakwas sighed and bent to take one of Mal’hari’s feet in her hands, turning it up to examine the sole. The bottom of their foot was, unsurprisingly, filthy, or at least stained by what he assumed was decades of wandering through life without the usual protection. Mal’hari did not seem bothered by the sudden interest in their feet and adjusted their posture accordingly to avoid tipping back from the sudden upset, their friend continuing the nervous shuffle near the edge of the bed. They made no indication of discomfort, or ticklishness, as Dr. Chakwas tapped and prodded at the bottom of their foot, settling back into their original position once she was satisfied with her findings. She finally turned her attention to the syringes, swapping her gloves for a new pair as she lifted one to show to Mal’hari. Their friend _flickered_ in place, fearfully casting a look to him and then back to Mal’hari, stammering out a few words before vanishing from the spot where they’d been, the only indication Mal’hari noticed the disappearance being a flattening of their ears, which would easily be read as uncertainty given how large the syringes were. 

“Name vaccine.” 

“Vakseen. Vakseen medicine?” She nodded.

“Vaccine medicine. Vaccine stop sick.” They frowned at that, visibly searching for words before motioning to themself. 

“Mal’hari no sick.” Dr. Chakwas looked to him, puzzling out how best to approach the topic of preventative measures before looking back to their patient. 

“Yes. Vaccine stop sick later.” It was clear they wanted far more clarification, but the lack of language proved to be a mountain that neither party could mount with the limited equipment they had to operate, and thus they seemed to concede, nodding slowly. Dr. Chakwas offered them a kindly smile and reached out to tap their thigh, tugging on the fabric of the pants they wore. 

“Off.” Mal’hari’s face went through a series of complicated emotions before they shifted to one side and tugged their waistband to their knees, holding their arm over their groin to maintain some modesty in the face of a lady. It was a shift from their earlier abashed nudity when swapping clothing in the garden, but he supposed it had something to do with their familiarity with humans, however impossible that seemed. Another question to be answered, hopefully soon. Dr. Chakwas grabbed a new disinfecting cloth and quickly swiped down the length of their right thigh, gently pinching at a few spots to determine where the thickest point in their muscle was before motioning for him to grab the other syringes and hold them at the ready. 

“Pain now.” Mal’hari pulled in a breath and nodded, struggling with whether they wanted to watch and eventually settling on watching after a few quick glances around the room, face pulled into a grim frown as Dr. Chakwas pressed the needle in and began the process of administering the vaccine. It was a rather quick process, for which he knew Mal’hari was thankful for, and once all three had been administered Dr. Chakwas stuck bandages on each injection site and helped pull up their pants. Mordin heard the research case beep quietly behind them, signaling that the blood samples were analyzed, and he pulled up his omni-tool long enough to download the results. As he did so Dr. Chakwas mimed out the best approximation of ‘you will experience soreness’ to their patient, who seemed to understand the basics. Mordin tasked himself with cleaning up their moderate mess, collecting the packaging from the disinfectant wipes and other bits of trash before bagging them and setting them aside to be disposed of once they returned to the Normandy, paying the barest amount of attention to their patient as they stood and quietly requested Dr. Chakwas’ help with something before kneeling near one end of the bed. He heard a small series of clicks and a wooden thunk before Mal’hari stood with what looked to be a long lock box tucked under their arm, laying it out on the bed and unlatching the lid. Dr. Chakwas’ gasp was enough to catch his attention, and once he saw the object inside, he knew why. The arm was spectacular in make, made of a dark burnished metal and interlocked using seamless, delicate plates to construct a hollow, but clearly operational prosthetic. It looked to be retrofitted from a piece of armor the longer he looked at it, and the hollowness of the pieces seemed to indicate that its original purpose was that of clasping over a physical limb. He also could not readily identify any mechanical parts that would facilitate movement of the arm, but perhaps it was solely intended to act as a facsimile to not aggravate those unsettled by missing limbs. 

“Help arm?” Dr. Chakwas readily agreed, reaching out to help lift the prosthetic from the box and cradling it in one hand as she looked over the construction. Outside of the box Mordin could see what looked to be a ring of metal that wrapped around the bicep of the prosthetic, runes or words carved into the metal and glowing blue in the light, not unlike the strange vial of light Mal’hari had used to guide them in the cavern. Mal’hari awkwardly stepped in closer to pull the straps over their head and adjust the pauldron over their shoulder, guiding their stump into the ring and letting the rest of the prosthetic lay in Dr. Chakwas’ grip as they adjusted the straps to hold it all in place. The chainmail that held the pieces together alongside the interlocked metal remained limp, as they adjusted and tugged at the various bits of the prosthetic until it sat comfortably against their bare skin. They took hold of the ring of carved metal and slid it up until it sat flush against the flesh of their stump, twisting it and seeming to tighten it before drawing a thumb across the carved letters. Mordin did not expect the flash of light from the letters, nor the slow curling of energy that seemed to emanate from them afterwards, the arm clicking audibly and visibly fleshing out with some impossible green-blue light that came from within the prosthetic. Dr. Chakwas withdrew her hands quickly but the arm did not drop limply, instead remaining aloft where Mal’hari held it, the grooves of the metal pulsing with light for a few moments before dimming, becoming barely visible between the cracks. Mal’hari tested the fingers and wrist, twisting and clenching carefully until they were assured that everything was in working order and letting their arm lay at their side, a smile on their face. 

“Ma serannas.” Dr. Chakwas nodded dazedly, still utterly perplexed by the sudden and seemingly impossible function of the prosthetic, her response one born from years of politeness rather than a mindful one. 

“You’re welcome.” Mal’hari let out what could be interpreted as a chuckle as they turned to grab their shirt from the dresser, the fitted one no longer an appropriate garment, and tugged it on quickly, tucking it in with far greater ease now that they had another limb. Mordin saw a flash of red light as they adjusted their waistband, infinitesimal and barely there, and he did not have an answer for what he saw. Perhaps a jewel or button hidden on the inside of the pants. Mal’hari caught his gaze, and simply offered a tilt of their head, putting it off as part of the process of putting their hair into a loose braid instead of the knot it had been tied in. 

“Language help now?” 

“Yes.” They smiled and nodded, waiting long enough for them to collect their cases before leading them out and back towards the main hall. Mordin caught sight of Mal’hari’s strange friend again as they passed the scaffolding, sallow eyes peering down from one of the platforms and hands wringing in their lap as though they wanted to follow but had been told not to. They flickered again, the image of their body convulsing and jittering in dissonance, like a weak wireless connection, before stabilizing enough for them to remain in place. He did not know what manner of technology was used to keep the figure invisible, but it seemed to be both a blessing and a sabotage based on what he had observed thus far. The figure kept muttering as they passed, a quiet repetition of ‘help’ following him until they crossed into the main hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter this time but I promise there's more to come soon! Like, a lot more.
> 
> Like a 10,000 word chapter more.


	6. Somniera : To Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you guys for reading, commenting, and kudoing this crazy piece of fiction, it means a whole lot to me!
> 
> Additional warning for graphic imagery dotted around the chapter, the most prominent instance will be following the line 'So, she fluffed up like a cat'.

The castle, Tarasyl'an Te'las, a name she would never pronounce right, was a beautiful place. In the hours they spent searching Shepard had found so many little places that only added puzzle pieces to the box. A tiny library on the second level of the tower with a stupidly plush armchair crammed into the center and a wine glass tucked out of sight, a balcony with an overhead view of the courtyard and a fully matched furniture set, a bedroom at the top of a ladder in a watch tower with a hole in the roof and bottles that were stained blue hidden under the bed. They found barracks, a communal bath, and a massive stone statue of a woman with a sword and her head bowed, iron candle sconces lined around her and a small mat on the floor. It all told a story that she couldn’t make out, like she was reading a book in Korean and she only had the alphabet under her belt. Even with pictures in the book she couldn’t understand more than the bare minimum. There were places that unsettled her, too. The dungeons were the worst. Whoever decided to leave a whole ass section of the wall open to overlook the crevice in the mountain side was a dumbass, but part of her could understand the logic in making the holding cells as uncomfortable as possible by putting them in a quasi-refrigerator. It also served as a strong motivator not to misstep, since the floor was little more than a U-shaped pathway giving approximately 7 feet of clearance for the guards. No handrails, no nets, just a straight drop to the icy rocks below. The whole place shuddered of death and discomfort, making Shepard’s hair stand on end more from discomfort than the cold. And throughout, there was silence, something Shepard thought she was accustomed to but was rapidly finding she had no idea what it truly meant. She’d read an article, once, about how humans were losing the ability to cope with silence because of something the author had called a ‘tolerance threshold’. This tolerance threshold for persistent ambient noise had gone up over several generations, meaning people were less bothered by buzzing and other low decibel, constant noises of machinery, but the tolerance for a lack of persistent ambience had gone down, and this had been blamed on the constant exposure and the resulting adaptation to convert the persistent noise into something that could be ignored to avoid sensory exhaustion, like how the body ignores the feeling of clothing on skin throughout the day. However, in the lack of said persistent noise, people had reported experiencing anxiety or discomfort due to the sudden absence of input and were faster to seek out noise-making items to compensate over the course of the longitudinal study. At the time, it had been a quick read with an interesting tidbit about gradual adaptation to technology and its omnipresence in people’s lives. But now, in the presence of true silence, Shepard was beginning to wish she had something, anything, to get rid of the ringing in her ears. Even now, as she and Thane sat in the under the gazebo as wind gently pushed at the grass and the trees and the weird little potted plants, it still wasn’t enough. There was a part of her that felt exhausted now that there was one less thing for her brain to process, and she had caught herself nodding off a few times in the past hour or however long they had been sitting outside. She craned her head back and stared up at the twisting clouds above, not a storm as she had first assumed, but a seemingly permanent fixture in the fabric of the sky. Marking something she didn’t have a name for yet. Thane chuckled next to her, a hand squeezing her knee and his voice strangely quiet, Shepard blinking and huffing when she realized her eyes had been closed again.

“You will wake up sore if you sleep like that.”

“I’m not falling asleep.” She forced herself to sit up to prove her point, feeling lightheaded as she did so. Thane made no comment, but it was clear that he did not believe her in the slightest, instead lifting an arm and pulling her in closer, using his other hand to adjust the cloak to wrap around her before tucking her into his side. She knew what he was trying to do, and it was not subtle at all, especially for a professed ‘best assassin in the galaxy’.

“Thane.” Shepard had wanted to sound determined, she had wanted to use her Commander Voice, but instead his name came out sounding tired and thin, which only helped dig her a deeper hole.

“Yes?”

“I’m not falling asleep.”

“Of course not, siha.” Shepard narrowed her eyes and shifted to pull away, huffing when Thane kept her in place. She was starting to feel petty, and that was not a dignified look on anyone as far as she was concerned.

“Do _not_ start with me.”

“I am not ‘starting’ anything; I would, however, encourage you to see the opportunity presenting itself in the privacy you have here.”

“I don’t think taking a nice little nap, on a foreign planet, in an exposed gazebo, is the smartest idea. Especially when something here made you forget.” He dipped his head in concession to that fact but kept his hold on her.

“That is a legitimate drawback of this place, yes, but we have established that the memory lapse may have been from finding or stumbling upon something we were not supposed to, and it is not a feature of simply existing in this castle. Were that the case, I am inclined to believe we would not even be on-surface anymore.” He squeezed her shoulder gently, motioning to their surroundings. “As it stands now, we are seated with a clear viewpoint of most entrances to this area, and the acoustics of this place are designed to make silent movement near impossible, meaning, for now, I am comfortable letting you sleep while I keep watch. Our weapons are close enough, and dry, and I have energy to provide biotic cover until a weapon is retrieved in the event we need them.” With her ear pressed against his shoulder she could feel the vibration of his voice, more specifically where the intonation differed from her translation, as he spoke. It was not helping keep her awake, at all. Thane shifted his grip to squeeze her side gently, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers.

“Take the time you have to rest before you are needed elsewhere. We cannot reasonably rely on you if you are exhausted. _I_ cannot, siha.” Shepard disliked very few things about Thane; yes, they disagreed on the situation with the Hanar, yes, she disagreed with his shouldering of full responsibility for Irikah’s death, but most of all, she disliked that he had a way with words that she never had and likely never would. It made it difficult to be suave and charming and anywhere near good enough to be wooing said assassin.

“You make it stupidly difficult to say no, you know that, right?” He breathed out a soft laugh and nodded, pressing a small kiss to the top of her head before returning to his original position. “Wake me up if someone calls.”

“Only if it is important.” She saw no reason to argue against that point, and likely would lose if she tried, and instead tucked her face into his shoulder to block out the sunlight. It was a good idea, the warmth on her face and the familiar scent of Thane’s everything filtering in and blocking out the alienness all around her. It was comfort, and it made it stupidly easy to fall asleep. Later, she’d find a way to deny her exhaustion, even in the face of how quickly she dropped out, but in the moment the relief was rapid and welcome. Usually when she fell asleep rapidly dreams didn’t come, nightmares were much duller, harder to remember in the morning, and she at least got a little rest. Exhaustion was a good a tool as any to keep memories and fears from bubbling up to the surface in the one space where she could escape, and it didn’t run the risk of addiction or organ failure like chemical aids did. Because of her habit of knocking out and staying out until she was yanked back to the world of the living, she had never experienced dreaming so powerful she was lucid. And, at first, she thought she’d been daydreaming while standing outside the doors to the room with the map and the massive tree table. That was, until she heard a man yelling from inside. Shepard reacted, shoving her shoulder against the door and forcing it open, ready to confront whatever was inside with a fist raised and skidding to a halt when she saw people, _humans_ , standing in the room with Mal’hari. There were three of them, one man and two women, but their bodies, their shapes, were warping and washing in and out like paint in water. Mal’hari was somehow solid, watching as the man yelled himself red, pointing to the map and gesturing wildly with his warping limbs. There were features of the people that she could fixate on, the man’s scarred lip and bright blue eyes, one woman’s somehow impeccable hair and gilded clothing, and the other’s cold, grey gaze intermixed with her resolute presence, as if that was a feature of her being. Mal’hari was…bright, hard to focus on and even harder to read with their back facing her, but she did lock onto their left arm, fully formed and _glowing_ a vibrant green from the palm up. The man’s words were garbled, like English thrown into a blender and pulsed a couple of times, and the sounds carried an echo to them, reverberating off walls and areas that didn’t match the room she stood in. It was all in disarray, dust and debris scattered throughout and the table bearing boxes and scrolls of paper with the map messily spread out across its surface, edges still curled from its time rolled into a tight cylinder. She stared, belatedly realizing none of them had noticed her entry, and watched as **Cullen** -how did she know his name?-spat out a word and fixed his finger on the map, pointing to somewhere near the Hinterlands. He was angry, she could remember, how could she remember, dark rings under his eyes and bruises fading near his hairline, and the others let him be. She heard **Josephine** speak, eyes rimmed with red, red like agony, red like aching, her hands clutching the clipboard in the crook of her arm as she fought to remain composed.

 _-nothing we can do, the bodies will be unidentifiable by the time our forces can excavate Haven._ The words sounded unintelligible, but she felt the meaning behind them, a rippling, bubbling, wave of sympathy, sadness, despair, and loss ripping through her. The floor felt like it was slipping out from underneath her, like sand under her toes as the tide pulled back from shore, and she fought to stay steady. She didn’t know how.

 _What do you suggest Herald?_  
Herald; a title  
Herald; a plea  
Herald; a death sentence 

Shepard felt her center of gravity, her center of self, warp and shift and twist, her vision clouding with greens, greys, whites, blacks, and colors she couldn’t find the names of, and then she was standing steady in the courtyard, watching the training ring being built. A little person, a man wearing a bright red shirt and blonde hair tied back in a little knot, directed the proceedings with Mal’hari by his side. Their arm was in a sling, the left one, and they were standing with a twist that spelled pain in every joint of their body. Sore, aching, bloodied, still standing because people needed them to. **Varric** looked to them, grinning and knuckling against their hip, teeth flashing like a shield against uncertainty. She felt the pressure against her own hip, reassurance and warmth passing through her despite not knowing this man. But she still somehow knew him and was comforted by his presence. A good man trying to convince the world he wasn’t.

 _Looking forward to seeing a bunch of shirtless men beat the tar out of each other, arent’cha, Sneaks?_ She knew the answer was no. It wasn’t voyeurism, it wasn’t for pleasure, it was preparation. Give the farm boys, ex-nobles, and homemakers a chance. Give them a _chance_ against the coming tide of dread and death and red, red lyrium. That pulsing, oozing sore leaking out onto the surface. She saw Mal’hari smile down at him and nod, putting their good hand up in surrender. She could see where their nails were blackened, cracking, bruised and busted, throbbing and painful. Bloodied knuckles that hadn’t yet healed raised in playful surrender.

 _You caught me, lethallin._  
Lethallin; yelled on a battlefield  
Lethallin; slurred into ale  
Lethallin; sobbed into the Stone 

Her stomach twisted with brambles of pain, and Shepard felt her legs go out from underneath her, her vision remaining steady long enough to see the castle warp and weft and change, green bleeding into stone bleeding into everything. She caught herself on the ground, stumbling to her feet on the stairs leading up to the landing with the matching furniture and the balcony looking over the courtyard. Smelling dust and high mountain air over a thin, lilac-like perfume. A dark-skinned human woman stood there, head held high and gaze turned towards the mountains, one hand placed delicately on the bannister. Resolute, composed, beautiful. Mal’hari stood to her left, wearing what looked to be formal attire, their hair down and delicately held in place with twisting braids, gold clasps accenting the dark fabrics and draped emerald silks over one shoulder, acid green searing her vision from their left palm. Pulsing in time with a heart that was not theirs. 

_I will admit, you surprised me with your verdict concerning Magister Alexius. I’m sure whatever research he does provide will be of value, but the taint of the Imperium will make many disinclined to use it to its full potential._ She tilted her head the barest amount to catch their gaze from the corner of her own, a cool smile crossing her features. Her shapes were more solid, Shepard realized, distinct and unwavering like the others before; cheekbones and lips and contours all where they needed to be to make an identifiable human face. Mal’hari rolled their head to the side and shrugged, an utterly indelicate and unrefined motion that seemed to make **Vivienne** smile, as if she expected the fine drapery to only accentuate the roughness of their nature.

_Our people would never know the source of their resources, then?_

_Never. We need them to use it, not throw it in a bin._ Shepard could taste the choking uncertainty like bile and sick, a desperation clawing at her gut when the thoughts and feelings spirited through her in a torrent. Our people need weapons, they need safety, they need power, they need shelter, they need, they need they need. _I_ need. Vivienne reached out to touch their shoulder softly, laying no more than her fingers against them as she spoke. Perfunctory and cool from the outside, but as reassuring as a full-bodied hug from within.

 _Too many whispers circulate that you are a Tevinter spy with the Altus sitting at your table, do not let this secret be the beginning to your unravelling, my dear._  
My dear; a cunning jab  
My dear; grabbing attention across the room  
My dear; a request to go on 

Shepard was ripped violently downwards, a yelp leaving her and sounding like a gunshot on a quiet night, her forehead colliding with the floor before she was yanked and pulled and twisted to her knees, staring up and up and up at a tear in the sky, the Breach, whispered in her ear by whatever the hell this was, and then something around her middle swept her away on a violent tide. She found herself on her back, staring up at the ceiling of the atrium, listening to ravens call to each other and feathers slowly falling from their cages. The smell of chalky paint in her nose and the ghost of a warm hand on her wrist. She rolled onto her side and forced herself to stand, feeling the ground ever shifting beneath her feet as she watched what was before her. A man sat cross legged in the atrium, long ears and slender fingers picking over a small portion of the wall near the floor, spackling and pushing pigment into the space he’d chosen. Pale, simple, bald, unobtrusive in every visage, but drawing the edges of this space towards himself like a black hole. Under the radar and spectacular. Mal’hari sat near him, smiling and watching the process with impossibly bright eyes and a palm flickering like fire in his lap.

 _Do you grow bored yet, Inquisitor?_ Hardly, there was peace here. Peace and quiet and solace. And **Solas**.

_Must I always be doing something to be entertained? Is it not enough to watch art create art?_

_You flatter me, but I distinctly remember you have reports to be writing. And a party-crashing to plan._

_It can wait, I have time to do it later._ It was a placation that burned in her throat as Mal’hari spoke it into being, the hedging fear of assassinations of queens, indecision of men, roiling violence abound, and lies in the mouths of lovers. Solas cast a sideways glance at them and hummed, smiling crookedly as he reached out to trace a finger under Mal’hari’s jaw. Rooting them in place, drawing them in, swallowing them whole. Ravenous.

 _Then I will take the compliment of your time, vhenan._  
Vhenan; fearful and quiet in the dark, blood in his mouth  
Vhenan; gasped, whined, bitten, sighed  
Vhenan; a knife in the ribs 

She ached, somehow feeling the heartbreak there, and her breath was yanked out of her as things shifted again, infuriatingly blurred and uncontrolled until she was seated in the library on the second level, basking in the sun like a cat. He didn’t so much catch her attention as dazzle her, even reclined as he was, glass of wine in hand and book in his lap. Bronzed skin, dark hair, darker moustache, and glittering eyes. A smile that taunted, that teased. Hands that were haunted. **Dorian** was in sharp focus, every plane of his body and shape in complete clarity despite the wavering surroundings, even his wine shivered as if it would be yanked away by the tide. The memory of him so strong that even this place could not forget him. She could taste the wine that stayed on his breath, the way it mingled with his strangely inexpensive, but intoxicating cologne. There was a swell of fondness in her chest that was not her own as she looked at him, unsure of what to make of the feelings. He snorted, clapping the book shut and looking up as Mal’hari slid into view, palm burning brighter still. Searing. Painful.

 _I asked for better reading material and all they gave me were elementary alchemical texts. All of which I’ve already read, by the way._ Dorian brought the wine to his lips and grinned under the rim of the glass; sly, hinting. _What good is a friendship with you if it doesn’t get me anything?_

_It gets you many things, chief among them being a roof over your head and keeping your neck away from the gallows._

_Oh, yes, so soon I forget the kindnesses I have been afforded. How gracious of you ser Inquisitor. Shall I polish your boots next?_

_You could polish something else, if you’re so inclined._ Mal’hari’s smile was sly, canines peeking out from the edges of a slow curl at the edge of their mouth. Knowing that Dorian would rise to the teasing, ever hungry to jump in on a line when it was lain out for him. There was heat, simmering and low and soft, but too exposed to burn just yet, and the two shared a knowing chuckle. A promise for later, a pact and a prayer, playful blasphemy for the hell of it. Dorian tipped his glass up and finished off his glass of wine before setting it aside, unfurling himself from the chair and slinking into Mal’hari’s space with a few smooth movements, the inches between them warm, comforting, and anchoring as they shared a breath. A world and a moment compressing down to the air between them.

 _My, you are very forward. I see my influence upon you is undue as ever. Shall we scandalize someone, amatus?_  
Amatus; a declaration of pride  
Amatus; shared between breaths, touches, gazes, and distance  
Amatus; whispered into silvering hair, a promise to return 

The pull was painful this time, ripping her away and dragging her across the ground as if she’d been thrown from a moving vehicle, other memories or conjurations or whatever the fuck she was seeing flooding her awareness in the shuffle. A straw blonde elf, that didn’t want to be, throwing sachets of flour onto the heads of dignitaries, cackling in joy and joy hiding shards of glass in her chest. A bearded man with two names and dead men clambering over his shoulders, doing right and done wrong, whittling a new life using the tools he could grasp at. A hawk, a king, a witch, and her vision stopped on a massive, horned man shouting over the crowd inside the tavern. People, bodies, milling and shifting, faceless and without identity save for those she could recognize, and a boy she couldn’t, with shaggy hair hiding in the corner. He watched her, staring and staring with his sunken eyes as she watched the horned man grin and thrust drinks into the hands of those he could reach. **The Iron Bull’s** face was warped, this place fuzzing him out like an overworked watercolor painting, only his magnificent horns and glinting eye patch making it through the picture. Mal’hari was dancing, in the way dancing was spinning and whipping a partner around in their arms, **Cassandra** clinging to their shoulders as she was picked up and spun with no small amount of laughter between them. It smacked of drunkenness and fun and celebration, rosy cheeks and unguarded smiles with the impending threat of headaches for their future counterparts. Shepard could feel herself getting swept up in it, the whirling and twirling and shifting making her dizzy, but in a strangely pleasant way, as if she were the drunk one and not a sober bystander. The music, the laughter, the drinking, and the talk washed together, their tottering dance going faster and faster and faster. It grew louder, cacophonous, sounds warping and creaking until it was only screaming with echoes of notes within, faces in the crowd going dark and red and red and red. So very, very red. Only for everything to go silent, the tavern snapping into sharp focus, floor going solid under her feet, room going silent, and the air itself sucking out of the space entirely. It was still, frozen with drinks on tables and food on platters, but it was all empty. The edges of her vision pumped in time with her heart, giving the whole place an unsettling pulse of its own as she stood in the epicenter, gasping for air that didn’t seem to be present, and casting about for some idea of what the hell had happened. And then she saw him, standing in the doorway with hands folded behind the small of his back, staring at her. It hurt to see him, and she did and didn’t know why. It scared her to see him, and she wanted to know why. There was something different about him, her impossible memory supplied, this time. Too sharp, too clear, too present, yet still seeming to suck and pull the edges of reality into himself as he stood there, taking her in as she did him.

And so, like the clear professional and totally in-control-of-the-situation person she was, she tried speaking.

“I didn’t do this.” His brow quirked slightly, an expression she remembered, somehow, used to be charming. Solas said nothing, taking a few careful steps forward and tilting his head to look _down_ at her. She wasn’t that much shorter than him, being a fairly tall woman herself, but the bare three or so inches apparently made a difference, and it was inordinately annoying. Her vision wavered again, the floor making a slow slide into a more liquid state before it snapped into focus again, Solas taking another few steps closer. Shepard took a few steps back to maintain the distance, Solas’ eyes flashing when he immediately caught the movement. Had she been dealing with normal circumstances with a normal person, one of two things would have happened. One, Solas would have noticed her discomfort and decided to stop trying to box her in against the wall like a normal fucking person. Two, he would be an asshole and do it just to make her uncomfortable, as was her general experience with men. But, as her situation was not populated with a normal person nor was the situation conventional in any fashion, Solas instead snatched out a hand and grabbed the front of her shirt, pulling her with far too much strength and closing a hand around her throat. The number of questions rattling around in her skull shuddered to a complete halt, observations coming in their stead, hard and fast and with a thousand implications she had no idea how to apply to her limited knowledge. He was solid, real. Not only was Solas solid, he radiated warmth as a living body even in this hellscape of a dream, and he had jumped forward five to seven feet to grab her from where she had been standing. Which at the very least meant this bullshit excuse for a dream had lax rules on what was realistic, something she could potentially use to her advantage if her brain would stop swimming in a thousand directions with a hundred memories that weren’t her own. And as potentially attractive as Solas was, she really didn’t need to know what he looked and sounded like coming undone in the heat of passion. Not when he had her by the throat. A thousand ways to escape flashed through her mind, unhelpful reminders of how lizards shot blood out of their eyes and or dropped their tails, neither of which she could accomplish even if she wanted to, and cats fluffed up to two to three times their size to seem bigger. It worked on basic predators, but not intelligent hunters like what was currently holding her in place. The tavern wavered and snapped into focus again, more violently before, and Solas tipped his head to the side slightly when he noticed. Or he made some other observation, she really couldn’t tell. The urge to get away grew, thundering through her veins until it was the only desire left.

So, she fluffed up like a cat, she pulled from somewhere deep and _thought_ terror, in any form she could muster. And it came, choking her like Ryncol mixed with mayonnaise. A message from myths weaved in flashes of flesh, metal, and fear, the Thresher Maw ripping stone as paper in its jaws and then doing the same to her crew, the Normandy...her Normandy, not the placative little piece of candy Cerberus bought for her, shattering and splintering over Alchera from one beam of piss-yellow light.

What it felt like to suffocate and _pop_ like a badly made sausage.

She felt the nightmare before she could see it, the constriction of breath, of movement in a suit that wasn’t designed for a spacewalk, the emergency hypos fighting and fighting and fighting to keep her alive, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing, adrenaline to keep her awake, medigel to seal the bursting layers of her skin, anti-inflammatories to stop the swelling, an injectable antacid to stop the others from making her sick, as if her stomach was still working. Her limbs kept swelling with edematous fluid in the vacuum, bones kept creaking, head kept ringing, blood kept pooling in her mouth and bubbling down her chin. Pop-pop-popping along with the bronchia in her lungs. The worst of it was the utter desperation for air, the wet, wet sounds that kept escaping from her even when she tried and tried and tried to scream instead. To sound like she was fighting instead of struggling. Anything but gurgling. Anything but the pitiful sounds of an inevitable end. Solas recoiled, as she expected, his eyes wide as the tavern shifted to black with pinpricks of white, whipping back and forth as her viewpoint flailed wildly along with her form, and then she was awake, bolt upright and sucking in a mouthful of air. Thane had completely relinquished his grip on her, his eyes trained on her as she pulled in breath after breath. They’d long since established a mutual rule not to touch until it was clear it would be accepted; it saved them the embarrassment of explaining black eyes and punched out throats to the medical team, and it gave them much needed practice with boundaries. Something she and Thane both struggled with, coming from a punch/shoot first background. Eventually she caught her breath and reached out, gripping Thane’s knee, whiteknuckling it, really, and sat back, swallowing dryly. Her mouth tasted like she’d gone to bed after a bender, with about the same amount of film on her teeth. Thane’s hand covered hers, the contact reassuring, though not as profoundly with two layers of suit between them.

“Three hours, siha.”

“Really? Didn’t feel that long.” She hated the fact her voice sounded fucked, cracking and warbling even after she cleared her throat a few times. He squeezed her fingers, silently watching. Asking was always off the table, but she could feel the question in his posture, in the way he breathed a little quieter despite there being no one else to hear the rasping. The gurgling at the tail end of an exhale. She bit back her grimace and turned her hand to squeeze his back, taking in a breath.

“I saw...people. Humans, I...I knew their names and things about them. Like I had memories of _them_.”

“Humans from this place? Or on Earth?”

“Here. Mal’hari’s...friends, confidants. The balcony on the second level, the one with the nice furniture, a woman named Vivienne stayed there. She...I don't know how to describe it. It was like she…she was dignity and grace personified. Not in a descriptive sense though, she just _was_ those things.” Thane blinked but said nothing, silently shuffling through his memories as she spoke. “And the library with the chair...Dorian sat there. All the time. I saw him drinking wine and reading books, complaining about the quality of them because they weren’t good enough for him. I think…I think he might be the one that left the spit sample you told me about.” He nodded, leaning closer and slowly coiling an arm around her hips.

“And they are not here any longer.”

“Not in the castle. But it didn’t feel like they were _gone_ , just not...present? I can’t...I don’t know what the fuck it all was.” She sighed, fighting to find words for what she’d experienced and finding none. How could you describe feelings in the form of memories that carried significance, but you didn’t know how or from where? What it was like to remember kissing and holding and loving someone you’d never seen before. 

“There was someone else in the dream, too. Differently, but the same.”

“How so?”

“Like...tangibly. They were there like you sitting with me, not a memory of you sitting with me, if that makes any sense.”

“I am following.”

“He looked like Mal’hari with the ears and body structure. He grabbed me, right by the front, and just… _looked_ at me.”

“He did not speak?”

“No. I...I scared him off. I pushed out images that I remembered, feelings too, to get him to back off. But Alchera...” She didn’t explain anything else, tightening her hold on Thane’s hand and staring at the grass and weeds at her feet. She didn’t see any bugs, not that she was expecting any. It was still disappointing. 

“EDI, can you read brain wave activity?”

_‘My connection to the vitals panel allows for basic readings to verify you are not braindead.’_

“Did the waves do anything weird while I was asleep? Was I in REM?”

_‘The available readings indicated that your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was active when it normally goes dormant during sleep, and activity in the amygdala and parahippocampal cortex was substantially higher than normal. Simply put, you were lucid dreaming, Commander.’_

“So…my brain just made everything up?”

 _‘That is the most likely scenario, unfortunately. There is no record of an individual gaining memories of people and places simply by sleeping in one location and dreaming about it.’_ Shepard didn’t like the answer one bit, even though most of her brain was on board with the possibility she’d just had a wild dream to fit the wild circumstances. But to just…imagine so many faces, names, events, and intricate details in one dream, when she wasn’t creative enough to draw more than a stick figure, rubbed her wrong. If she got Mal’hari alone she might ask them about everything she’d seen. It was too real not to.

“It’s still two weird brain-state things happening in a really fucking short time and I don’t like it.”

“It’s not ideal, no.” 

_‘I would suggest speaking with the medical officers available to conduct a more thorough examination. I apologize for changing the subject so rapidly, Commander, but the Alpha version translation matrix is complete, and you wished to be informed the moment it was available. I am uploading it to your devices now, mistakes will be recorded and rectified as they are found.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! I started a new job a week ago so things have been a little crazy. I do have a backlog of chapters starting so the wait between updates shouldn't be too long, but I'll try to let you guys know in advance if things change <3


	7. Era'mana : History

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deep lore dive incoming!
> 
> Once again thank you to everyone that has read, kudoed, and commented! Hopefully y'all don't hate me after this chapter orz

To say he was overwhelmed by the sudden change of pace in Skyhold was a severe understatement. It felt as though he’d been stuffed into the barrel of a cannon for so long that when the powder finally was lit, he was not prepared for the blast, and despite wanting things to change he was fearful of it. It was a hazard of standing in the face of multiple evils at once and doing so knowing one would eventually spell his or the world’s end, of playing witness to a hundred changes made by the hands of others and being the one blamed for the results. To have agency was…strange. And to have agency and presence amongst completely foreign entities was even stranger. The two non-humans, for that was the only unoffensive descriptor he could give, that had accompanied Shepard were of incredible interest. Particularly the green one, Thane Krios, who seemed to stand just out of sight and shift in place, ever wary of their position in the room in relation to the rest, and always, always watching him with fathomless black eyes and a face that he could not judge emotion upon despite the close approximation of human features intermixed with the foreign ones. They had an attention to detail that lent them to remembering even the smallest of words Mal’hari had said in the short time they had been together, which was in equal measures fascinating and concerning. That one did not trust; they did not fall for the pitiable sight he was with one arm, a castle of nothing but memories, and a world of corpses. He quite liked them for that reason alone, even if it meant they would be a nuisance later. The orange one, Mordin Solas (Solus? Solehs?), captured his attention simply because their body was strange. Three fingers, massive amphibious eyes, strange face, and a concave yet convex torso was hard to ignore, even though he was long past the stage in his life that excused staring in wonder, he had to force himself not to whenever that one wandered into his line of sight. And the way they spoke was even more baffling, with short staccato syllables wrapped around complex, near lyrical-sounding words that wove into an entirely unintelligible mess that Shepard and the others understood by some act of magic or incredible linguistic ability.

He was more inclined to believe they had managed to learn each other’s languages based on how well the one sitting across from him, Miranda Lawson, was picking up Common simply by looking at the dictionary between them, and in the ten hours he had spent watching her progress, they had managed to cobble together enough understanding of one another to establish a few things. Mainly, Shepard was their leader, they were not from Thedas, and they were not from any of the surrounding continents, but they had somehow arrived in the heart of the Hinterlands by ship. Miranda had tried to explain more thoroughly but only managed to confuse him further with implications of flight and heavens and eventually she gave up in deference to time. And in that time, he had been left to ponder everything that he had learned, and everything Cole had all but dropped on him during the examination. Memories that were not his own but so clouded by Cole’s…everything that he couldn’t make out images. Only words with emotional meaning that he could not understand. Sunset eyes and a laser sight, feelings of love and loss and _hurt_ , breaths of Siha on skin and how it burned in his-no, _Thane’s_ , throat like smoke, the conflict of vows and new love. It was all very strange, and it was not very helpful in retrospect, but he knew Cole needed that moment to come clean about a mistake, though that mistake was very small in consideration to everything going on. And it was helpful in preparing him for the inevitable question of why they were stuck in time. It also gave him time to come up with an answer, because he really didn’t have one that could explain sufficiently but still hide what he needed to. He adjusted his posture and carefully leaned on the table, watching as Miranda’s omnee-tuul, or Eedee as he’d heard it called, passed a line of light over another page of the dictionary and create an identical image on its glowing orange surface, the process just as fascinating as it had been the first one hundred times he’d watched it happen.

He was grateful that she seemed to understand the value of handling the book with care, which had been a concern when he first showed them the text; four pairs of eyes lighting up like children and Shepard’s grasp far too harsh on the leather as she grabbed it away from him, and then Miranda away from her. It was strange seeing seemingly well-read individuals ogle over a book, as they had over regular paper and utensils, but he was beginning to think that the orange panels on their arms had somehow replaced tactile objects for such things, and what he had in abundance was a luxury to them. Mal’hari glanced over at Jacob, who was boredly picking at one of his gloved hands, occasionally looking back to them to check in before returning to his task. There was distrust written more clearly in his posture and actions; he smacked of a man who had no qualms in showing his emotions and telling things as they were instead of engaging in petty double speak. Not for a lack of understanding, but for a lack of patience for the whole debacle. Better to talk plainly and achieve things instead of wasting hours and days with petty social games. It was something he intended to maximize upon, if only to get a completely honest description of this group’s intentions for Thedas. He’d already surmised that their structure imitated one of militaristic nature, with Shepard at the head and Miranda as her second then the others as a general crew, but given their lack of readily identifiable weaponry and a greater presence of medics and researchers, he was more inclined to believe they were an investigative team for a larger body, like his own scouts had been. Though what they were searching for was entirely left up to what their people considered to be valuable or worth seeking out in hostile land, especially if they had knowledge of the Taint. Miranda had hinted they knew of the illness but not what it entailed, which meant they were cautious, though it was due to a lack of understanding the severity of what plagued Thedas. It was all very frustrating and the most he could do was sit and wait for the impossible orange panel to do its work, forcing himself to trust in their assurance it would somehow let them understand what he was saying, and give him the same ability. Miranda flipped to the next page, now four fifths through, and paused, fiddling with the orange panel and muttering something to it before another voice came through, feminine, polite, and speaking Common.

“Comprehend I speak you can? Correctly please repeat structured.” He was figuratively knocked prone for a solid few seconds, his predicament nearly forgotten as the words spoken through the orange panel made more sense than he had anticipated. Miranda was watching him, as was Jacob, and it took his full effort to repeat what had been said, heart in his throat as he leaned forward to speak at the orange panel.

“You can comprehend what I say? Please repeat the correct structure.” There was a moment of silence, Miranda’s gaze dropping to her panel as she watched little white lines swap places and seemingly correct themselves on the floating image before the voice spoke again.

“Am I spoken correctly?”

“Am I speaking correctly?” Another pause, and then the voice spoke again.

“Base structure established. Please stand by, sending translation to ground team devices.” His joy was severely underpinned by the mention of a ground team, anxiousness balling up in his gut at the reminder that there were many more of them close by, and available at the drop of a hat. He didn’t have the resources to fend off six people, let alone a larger team, and one that potentially had a hive mind based on how quickly they sent information to one another. He dreaded to think what would happen if they decided now was the time to take control. Mal’hari watched as a ripple of reactions passed through the assembled group, Miranda and Jacob perking up first, and then Chakwas and Mordin. Their expressions were mostly similar, a mix of pleasant surprise and excitement as four sets of eyes swiveled and fixated on him, expecting words and explanations and _everything_ all at once. Despite the sudden performance anxiety, he forced himself to sit up straight and carefully measure out his next words.

“Does this mean you understand me, now?” There was a flurry of nods and words he couldn’t understand as they all began talking amongst each other, the slam of a door in the atrium and the shuffle of two more pairs of feet alerting him to the oncoming presence of the last of the party, and the fact they had also ventured back to the garden, likely to collect something from their abandoned armor. The decision to collect one of his daggers was feeling like a better idea now. He locked eyes with Shepard as she entered with her shadow not two steps behind her, their borrowed cloaks gone. Her hair was slightly mussed and her eyes were fighting to retain focus, the small markers of a rapid awakening lacing throughout her form as she entered the room. He wondered if she dreamt of anything, and whether those dreams had been Dreams. There was a strange sort of calm that fell over him then, the kind of calm that fell in battle, clarity amid utter confusion that only could be achieved by the heart thundering excitement from incredibly high stakes. It was as though he had sat down to gamble for the life of a friend. Depending on how they felt about Cole, he very well might be. Miranda suddenly stood and delivered something to her Commander, and there was a span of silence in which Shepard fiddled with the strange metal object before it was passed off to him. What he found in his hand was a curved, white metal object with what looked like a squishy mushroom cap on one end, and he could not begin to guess its function, or how to use it. Shepard mimed the motion of hooking the object around her ear and placing the end inside, which he was reluctant to do but obliged regardless, the piece settling nicely enough after a few moments of fiddling and situating around the long shell of his ear. It blocked out sound on one side for a short moment, then a soft beep drilled directly into the base of his skull and he was able to hear again, Shepard’s voice coming through with the barest amount of distortion to it.

“Does everything correct sound?” It was a strange sensation to hear Shepard’s true voice and her strange language with one ear, but his own language in the other, words failing him as he struggled to reconcile the two noises at once. “Can you understand me?”

“I can.” Her shoulders dropped and there was a unanimous breath of relief from several members at the table, Jacob’s head rolling back as if he was releasing a long-held breath. “We have…much to talk about.”

“We do. Room with that map, place good speak to?” There was a soft beep in his ear, one he assumed was the object correcting what he was hearing as it caught mistakes.

“Yes. The map will be helpful in explaining things.” Shepard nodded and motioned to the others to stand, Mal’hari taking that as his sign to lead them towards the War Room. The walk was so familiar that memory guided him more than conscious thought, doors opening, stairs passing, and the chill of the hall simply washing over him as they had a hundred, maybe even a thousand, times before. He held the door for them when they reached the War Room, circling the table and taking what used to be Josephine’s spot at the center, watching the others assemble around the other edge. So familiar an image, yet so foreign that nostalgia did not quite settle in him. Miranda immediately took interest in the map, as did Jacob, while Chakwas zeroed in on the metal spires behind him, each adorned with the symbols of his councilors. There was silence, both he and Shepard visibly struggling with what to say, where to start, who to address. Eventually, she straightened her posture and set one hand on the table, splaying her fingers out over the edge of the map.

“Before start we, male can you if tell us?” It was not at all what he expected as an introduction, and for a moment he was caught so off guard that he could not piece together what Shepard had meant to say in the first place, blinking dumbly.

“Please repeat that.”

“Can you tell us if you are male?”

“I…would expect your medical exam determined that quite readily, Commander.”

“Gender different than sex. Want you refer to correctly.” It took him longer than he cared to admit to arrive at the avenue she was taking, but the pieces slid into place and eventually clicked when he realized what was going on. He supposed it was a bit harder to tell where he fell with the hair and the eyelashes.

“Ah. Yes, I am.” Mordin seemed to take the most interest in that statement, wide eyes blinking rapidly and a smile passing over their face as they took note. “Do I ask the same of you as part of your formal greeting?”

“No, no. It’s courtesy a just.”

“Then I suppose I should be courteous.” It seemed to be the right avenue to take, Chakwas sending him a far warmer smile than Shepard’s congruent expression.

“We’re all what we to be appear.”

“And your two friends?”

“Oh, yeah, I suppose they’re a little hard to pin down. They’re both the equivalent of male for their species.” He nodded, tucking the information away to process much, much later.

“This is...very strange.”

“First contact is always, and you’re getting a deal three-for-one.”

“I did not think my people were so new to humans, though. Unless we’ve been forgotten.”

“We’re from here not.”

“Miranda explained as such…I’ll admit I can only make guesses about the…vehicle by which some of you arrived. Are you from the Amaranth?” Shepard shuffled slightly, seeming to take an inordinate time finding her words before she waved it off with a hand. Not dismissively, but certainly putting it to the back burner.

“Let’s start introductions with first, then information.”

“Of course.” He motioned for her to go first, taking note of the rather lacking involvement of the rest of her crew.

“I am Lieutenant Commander Shepard of the Normandy SR-2 naval operation.” The way she said it reminded him intimately of Cassandra, a mixture of pride and exhaustion at her prestigious titles, position, and glory seeping into her words. If she shifted posture just enough to rest her weight on one leg, she would be a spitting image, albeit with darker skin and deeper facial scarring.

“Well met, Commander. I am Mal’hari Lavellan; once Inquisitor of the second Inquisition, Herald of Andraste, and an Eye of Dirthamen.” He allowed himself a smile, brushing off a small piece of dirt from the map. “Now all I am is the…keeper of this place.”

“Do those of any mean you are leader?” Another beep.

“Yes. The position of Inquisitor was once the highest rank within the organization.”

“Comparable to what?” He considered that for a moment, idly picking at the edge of the map. It hadn’t afforded him much respect with nobles until their desperation took hold, he certainly wasn’t the religious sort, and the land he technically owned in Kirkwall was little more than a ploy to infuriate the powers that be, which left him with one legitimate avenue to establish his past prowess.

“A military head. Possibly an Admiral or General.” He saw the way Shepard’s brows rose towards her hairline, Jacob shuffling and adjusting his posture. “But, as I said, those titles mean nothing now that there is no one for me to command.”

“Would you prefer we call you Inquisitor? Or Herald?”

“I prefer to have no title at all. Mal’hari or Lavellan is quite enough, Commander.” Shepard visibly hesitated but did not argue. “You respect me more by not using those titles. Using them would be akin to calling a man a king long after he’s lost his kingdom. Insulting, at the very least.” 

“Understood.”

“Now, if I may be the first to ask questions, why you are here? _How_ are you here?”

“The answer short is investigation. Your…home is under quarantine, but there was no solid explanation for why beyond an unidentified or researched plague. I wanted to know more.” Mal’hari frowned at that, trying to piece together what he could from the implications between the lines of what Shepard had told him.

“What do you mean by my home? Skyhold?” She struggled for a few moments before motioning to the whole of the map before her.

“Thedas, and further.”

“And there are powers outside this place that determined it necessary to quarantine us based on a vague understanding of the plague.”

“Yes.” Her tone was enough indication she was not happy with how little information had been used to separate Thedas from other places, which meant it was possible someone had made a hasty decision and it was coming back to bite them.

“You came from the sky, is there a place above that houses another civilization?” 

“Do you…any have concept of astral bodies?” That was a very strange response, but he supposed it was in line with what he had asked.

“Some. Astrology was not my passion, I’ll admit, but iI have basic knowledge of how our heavens work.” She nodded, seeming incredibly nervous after hearing of what he’d said.

“Is Thedas the name of your world, continent, or country?” Again, a very strange detour. 

“It is the name of the land within the bounds of this map. I have no knowledge whether this place resides as a massive island amongst others, or if it is one mass of land we never completely explored.”

“Do you have names for places outside Thedas?”

“A few, most are fables that returned with usually maddened explorers. The Sunless Lands are apparently somewhere to the south of the Korcari Wilds. To the far west there is supposedly a place called the Viridis, but these mountains here make it impossible to travel, and even if we did cross them, there are reportedly jungles beyond them that are hostile. The islands of Par Ladi in the Boric Ocean. The Amaranth, a place that drives men mad, according to failed colonizers, and I have no names for the rest.”He indicated each place as he spoke of it, sighing and withdrawing his hand from the Amaranthine Sea, regrets of investigations long left cold. So many lanes he could have walked but chose not to out of fear.

“Do you know if there are people that reside in those lands?” 

“I…received written contact from a group of people claiming to represent powers from across the Amaranthine Sea, but I do not know if they truly existed or if it was some prank to draw resources away from our purpose.” 

“Alright, can you…suspend disbelief for a moment so I can tell you how we came here?”

“You are already impossible, and I have two complete anomalies standing across from me. Anything you say will be of little surprise.” And he had fought gods, but she did not need to know that just yet. She gave him a strained smile but continued, motioning to the map in front of her.

“Let’s start by establishing that this map is part of what would fit on a globe amongst the other bodies of land connected by the oceans and seas, some you don’t have maps of. That entire system, that entire world, is what is under quarantine because of the disease. The group I have with me is an infinitesimal representation of the worlds outside yours. Thane and his people came from a completely different astral body, we call them plahnets, farther away than you have ever traveled. Same with Mordin. There is…there is a human installation called the Systems Alliance, a unified military body that was formed after humans achieved flight and could leave their homeworld, a place called Earth, and travel into the space beyond it. Members of the Alliance determined that your world was too sick to allow contact with the rest of the galaksee, so they put you on a no-land quarantine, meaning vessels aren’t allowed to touch down because of the risk of carrying the disease off world and infecting other places.” Mal’hari could feel his mind spinning in his skull, for once in his life aware of nothing around him but Shepard and her fantastical words.

“Could you…show me? So that I may at least understand the scale you are speaking on?” There was immense hesitance, then, Miranda and Chakwas drawing back as if he had asked them to hand over their children, and Shepard’s jaw clenched as she stared him down, grey eyes calculating and flaring with that strange, faint red glow he could only catch if she stared at him head on. Like coals burning deep within her. But she did not refuse him, her omnee-tuul flaring and the light from it expanding until it created an image in the middle of the air of a strange miasma, dotted with little lights, some with names in her language, others unmarked, and then three larger spheres that had names attached. One sphere had a gently pulsing red dot, Shepard pointing to it.

“That’s your homeworld. It’s registered in our daytahbase as T1-13D45. Your homeworld resides within a system called the Far Rim, which is a section of a larger body that humans call the Milky Way galaksee.” After a moment the image faded and was replaced by a new one, even larger than before, and in the shape of a massive spiral with a bright white center. This image had hundreds of labelled dots, thin lines of light crisscrossing between them as a network of roads or paths or some other impossible thing, awe turning to utter disbelief as he stared at the whole of it. He nearly missed the faint pulsing of the red dot in the upper right side of this ‘map’, clearly indicating his place in the swirling mass. There was silence, and truthfully, he did not know if it was because of the ringing in his ears, or if Shepard had simply chosen to let him absorb what he saw at his pace. He felt his heart jackrabbiting in his chest and throat, and for a moment he was sure he had gone completely mad. Completely and utterly mad. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of struggle to regain his voice, Mal’hari managed a few words, still staring at the map with blurring vision.

“Where is your earth?” Another dot lit up, near the bottom left of the swirl and almost completely opposite from where Thedas was. “And-and there are only humans there?”

“Originally, yes.”

“And humans have always been there, they did not...arrive or travel to Earth?”

“Yes. There’s a little more to it than just…suddenly being there, but yes, humans started out on Earth, as far as we know. Is it the same for here?”

“No, humans...humans arrived on foot from the north. We never really knew where they truly originated from, they just...settled here and spread.”

“How long ago?” The question was strangely forceful, Shepard’s posture tense as she waited for his response.

“Several thousand years ago.” Shepard’s gaze lingered on him for a moment before she nodded, seeming to let the issue rest for the moment. “What of Thane’s...homeworld?” Two dots appeared this time, one a more muted red than the other, and further apart than Mal’hari had expected. Before he could ask for clarification, Thane spoke up, hands folded behind himself and chest pushed out slightly. The posture made him ill.

“My people fled, our home was unable to support life any further and we were forced to relocate.”

“Illness? War?”

“We ruined the land and water with rapid expansion and little consideration for renewability.” It was clear there was so much more but Mal’hari was unsure he could handle an entire species’ history in one blow, nodding and allowing himself the capacity of sympathy. A small, withered part of him felt angry, jealous of the ease at which they had simply picked up and left a ruined world behind.

“What of Mordin’s?” Another dot, another distance Mal’hari had no concept of how to cross. “All of these places…you travel to them? Easily?”

“Yes. We use a system of relays, like the eluvian but much, much larger. Using ships, like the one you saw when Miranda and the others arrived, we enter them and are passed off to other connected relays in various places throughout the galaksee, which enables us to cross incredible distances in seconds.” He nodded, resisting the urge to ask how many the vessels carried, their power source, anything about the dimensions and shape. If they moved like birds or used fire to push them like the craft that had delivered the others. It would not do to look desperate, and he had an inkling that there would be no offer to carry him away. He was not sure he would accept even if they did.

“When was the quarantine set?”

“Approximately 25 years ago.” His stomach plummeted.

“When did humans leave Earth?” Shepard paused, silently counting out on her fingers until she arrived at what seemed to be a passable answer, her small shrug more for herself than anyone else.

“About 224 years ago, but we didn’t really start exploring until about 144 years after the initial exit. We were at war with another species when your home was discovered, and the person that decided to put you on quarantine did so with very little knowledge and resources.” It was as if he’d been gored by a druffalo, something akin to heartache mixed with relief and utter abashment slopped into one terrible puddle that settled in his gut. He knew it shone clearly on his face, Shepard’s grimace tightening and her voice going uncharacteristically soft. They had arrived at the same utterly devastating conclusion.

“When did the plague hit?”

“It-I-it-thousands of years ago, and it never went away...it just kept coming in waves until the Calamity.” He forced himself to suck in a lung-full of air and let it out, dragging a hand down his face slowly. “We called it the Taint, it…it was many things beyond a plague, and it crossed from person to animal to land as readily as air.”

“If someone coughed on another, would they fall ill too?

“If it was a wet cough, possibly. Any fluid an infected person...ejected was dangerous, including sexual expulsions. Contact without infection is possible, but incredibly rare, and even when taking significant precautions many people still caught it simply by being in the proximity of a Tainted place or person.” Mordin’s eyes flickered rapidly as he raised a hand to catch Mal’hari’s attention.

“What are symptoms?”

“Of what I saw personally, most people suffered lethargy, hair loss, deformity, they would develop sores and boils, some would have a cough, experience stomach upset, liquefaction of the bowels, many were easy to bleed, their skin turned paper thin. The black veins are the only constant, and they usually start in the center of the chest, darkening and spreading as the illness progresses.”

“All of those seem...expulsive. Like the illness is meant to make the body spread it.”

“It would not surprise me if that was the case.”

“Is there any way to cleanse it? You had the bath of water that seemed to be good enough to let us in.”

“What I had you do with your...armor is the only way I’ve managed to render infected material somewhat harmless, but the brine is still dangerous once the infected material has sloughed off the armor.”

“And that’s it? You have no other disinfectants or solutions meant to completely scour a surface?”

“We have lye and vinegar, neither have been as effective as salt and boiling water. If I had better access to ethanol, which was becoming popular in accomplished medical circles before the Calamity, I’d be better equipped, but I’m not an alchemist and hard liquor makes a poor substitute.” Chakwas and Mordin shared a long, significant look, their faces shifting imperceptibly as his answers carried far heavier implications with their education to supplement it. Chakwas turned her attention to him again, hand poised over her omnee-tuul in preparation to take more notes.

“Was there an average life expectancy for an infected person?”

“As little as an hour and as long as years. Those that lasted more than a half a year were considered blessed, or very unlucky. It was believed the longer someone lingered with the Taint, the higher the chance they would become a Darkspawn.”

“And Darkspawn are those…things? Banafelas?”

“Banallen, yes.”

“Was it a medically proven fact that the longer a person lived with the Taint the higher their chances of becoming overtaken? Or did it always move to the brain regardless of the length of infection?” 

“Truthfully, I have no grasp on it. Those stupid or cruel enough to experiment with it only really determined that it was a randomly progressing illness with the chance of resistance being completely unidentifiable. If the victim is lucky, they die, and if not, they lose themselves to the disease and become ravenous. That is if they allow themselves to be killed by it. Many would resort to suicide to eliminate the chance of becoming a Darkspawn, or they would be killed by others offering them ‘mercy’.” 

“Do you know how the body takes on the shape? We saw a bear that had…protrusions and hanging flesh, is that just decomposition in process?”

“In part. Any infected person or animal experiences a decline in all aspects, alongside the physical decline there is a…significant change in the mind. Aggression and near rabidity come far quicker and easier, which drives an infected subject to attack and fight, usually injuring themselves in the process and increasing the chance of infecting others. If they are not killed by their kin, they eventually flee their pack or society and follow a rapid descent into cannibalism and consumption of Darkspawn…byproduct that completes the mutation.” Chakwas pulled a face that was akin to smelling wet dog shit on a summer afternoon, completing her notes before speaking again.

“I’m assuming that when you say waves, you mean the illness returned every few centuries?”

“In the simplest of terms, yes. The Taint never truly vanished, nor did the Darkspawn, but the presence was greatly diminished during a Thaw. At the Taint’s worst culmination, it was considered a Blight. During a Blight the whole world suffered; it was not just a sickness of the body but a sickness of...everything. Trees rarely grew, crops yielded little, children were born frail if they were birthed live at all, foodstuffs rotted faster, people caught ill more frequently….it was as if a miasma fell over the whole of this land and consumed us.”

“How many Blights were there?”

“Five, before the Calamity…each varying in span and severity.”

“And how long ago was the Calamity?”

“…some 1,556 years ago, by my count.” The weight of the years affected him as much as it did his guests, their eyes going wide with shock alongside his own silent melancholy. It had been so, so long.

“Are there any more survivors? People who have escaped infection over the years?” He gave Chakwas a tired smile, raising his hand and pointedly ignoring Mordin’s faint tilt of the head and quirked…eye. Her face fell, Shepard’s own expressions going through a complicated series of emotions as she took in what he said.

“What about the stasis field you have around this place, has it prevented you from aging? Or is it designed to ward off the Darkspawn?” One 1,000 gold question asked, many more to go.

“It is designed to sustain me, to a degree, but not to prevent aging. This field is more to stop my body from requiring sustenance while I reside here, and it holds the castle together so it will not crumble but otherwise time passes normally. Were suspension of time the goal I would be trapped within the diameter of the field, and once I exited, I would experience the weight of the years all at once, which is not…fatal to me, but not ideal.”

“Just this place? Nowhere else?”

“The two mages I asked to construct the magic were not strong enough to manage any larger a sphere of influence than the bounds of the outer walls. In truth they were lucky they managed even that, given the resources we had at our disposal.” There was a long stretch of silence, the air buzzing with so many unspoken questions he could feel his hair curling with them, Shepard’s gaze holding his own, dropping away, casting about the room, and then returning multiple times before she finally spoke.

“What constitutes magic? Is that a term for technology?”

“By textbook definition magic is a natural physical phenomenon that is drawn from the Fade, a realm of spirits. Those able to harness the Fade’s energy were considered mages and their casting ability depended on the depth of their connection.”

“And where is the Fade?”

“In the beginning, it was simply interlocked with this realm but has since been separated by the Veil.” There was a round of whispers then, his device catching mention of ‘raydeeashun’ and ‘energy readings’, both of which made no sense to him, but implied they had somehow felt the Veil upon arriving.

“Spirits are the dead, I’m assuming.”

“Not…quite. It’s an entire metaphysical debate regarding their nature, and I am far from the best person to engage in it since I am not a mage and have had very limited personal contact with them. Were my…were my friend here, he would be able to offer a four-day symposium on the topic, and a very passionate one at that. But my understanding of them is as real beings that embody a single facet of life. A spirit of…knowledge, let’s say, is driven to share and distribute information and offer enlightenment to minds. They embody an aspect of life so completely that if twisted from it they are completely distorted, which then creates a demon. Passion turns to Lust, Ambition to Greed, Wisdom to Pride, and so on.” He received several nods that were like a scholar listening to a madman, though their reactions were kept respectful as another round of looks and subtle whispers passed between them, Chakwas looking to him with another line of inquiry. 

“If it has been a thousand and some years since the collapse of civilization, and you claim to have seen it, does that imply your people’s lifespan is multi-millennial?” He shook his head, sighing.

“My lifespan is…an outlier of my people; a remnant of our, I hesitate to say greater, past, but the reasons for this are far more complicated and require a longer explanation of certain things to make complete sense.”

“Where do you need to start?”

“At the origin of everything, I suppose.”

“A creation myth?” He wondered whether Miranda assumed that would be the case because he was primitive by comparison, or because her culture carried the same superstitions. It didn’t offend him, but it was comical that even after so long humans still assumed he was a tribal fiend. Though, given his comparable intelligence, it was not entirely untrue now.

“Not so intangible, no. The origin of the peoples of Thedas, the Taint, and the largest bits that led to the Calamity.” Shepard nodded, adjusting her posture and leaning her hip on the edge of the table.

“Alright. Start when you’re ready. Do you want us to hold questions until end or interject as they come?”

“Speak up, it is easier if I clarify when needed.” Everyone nodded in understanding, several more orange panels opening as they prepared to take notes, though Thane was mysteriously reticent and alone in his reluctance to follow suit. Mal’hari took a significant amount of time organizing his thoughts and preparing himself for the long haul.

“I will start with a disclaimer that my memory of these events and my perspective is not to be taken as fact. Much of what I speak of is taken verbatim from the mouths of others. This is at best a personal account intermixed with other personal accounts and historical texts written by the victors of each conflict. At the very least it is incredibly biased, and you would do best to take what I say under that advisement. With that said…I would ask that you not judge the character of those I speak of without taking my previous statement under careful consideration, as there are depths to certain issues I will inevitably gloss over.” He waited for any questions and when he heard none he continued, motioning to his ears. “To begin, my people are called elves, and, at our inception we were a tribal group that wandered the lands of Thedas with lives that spanned millennia. We were inherently magically inclined and could enjoy the benefits of the Fade, its denizens, and the wonders it afforded us. With such long lifespans my people wandered and built cities in impossible places, atop mountains, within expansive deserts, and deep within forests dense with trees as wide across as this room, connected and made accessible by the eluvian network. One such city, the only city most remember or researched, was Elvhenan, hidden within the forests of Arlathan. Elvhenan was perhaps the largest of the cities constructed by the elves, regaled as a place of worship, arts, grandeur, and beauty.” He took a map marker headed with a crown and placed it over the forest, the iron piece heavy in his hand.

“How long ago was that from now?” Mal’hari paused, working out the ages and years across the various calendars until he had an approximate answer.

“About 10,600 years ago, give or take a few decades. That is not accounting for the millennia spent wandering in tribes.” There was a moment of silence as everyone except Thane took that down, the fathomless eyes still watching him from his spot to the right of Shepard. It was a subtle thing, but Mal’hari caught sight of one arm extended far enough to be, theoretically, touching the small of her back. He wondered if that marked their relationship as intimate, as Cole’s memory of Thane’s memory implied, or if that boundary was not present in whatever species Thane represented. It was certainly friendly, regardless.

“As you can imagine, the formation of cities meant the formation society, which led to the settling of an established hierarchy. In this case, it was based upon an individual’s magical ability, those who were powerful rose to the top and those who had no talent for magic fell to the bottom, settling in layers of privilege. Skipping forward approximately three thousand years we arrive at the first contact between the elves and our second race, dwarva as they called themselves, known in Common as dwarves.” This time, Miranda looked up from her notes, frowning.

“Does race mean they were considered a different species entirely?”

“Yes. They looked like humans but were of shorter build, had thicker bones, and were not affected by certain illnesses and poisons.”

“Did humans here never have the propensity for dwarfism as a birth defect?”

“No, that risk was present, particularly during a Blight, but the differentiation between a human and dwarf even then could be made using their body proportions, from what I saw. Dwarves were…squat, but everything was proportionate where an afflicted human had abnormalities and challenges. Were a human and a dwarf to have a child that child would be half-dwarf and share traits from both parents.”

“Was there a way that people could tell the difference between a little person and a Dwarf? Specific physical traits beyond their height?”

“No, they did make use of specific facial tattoos to demarcate their family, affiliations, and origins, but there was no significant difference like my ears and yours.”

“Did the perceived difference matter?” It was Jacob who asked, something uncomfortable and tense lacing through his words.

“They were the basis for many wars, oppression, and misdeeds…usually hidden behind some other agenda, though not very well.” He gave Jacob a wry smile. “You will find that is a theme for most of our conflicts, regardless of species or religion. The difference that my people latched onto was not of their bodies, but of their lack of magic. The dwarves lived underground and considered seeing sunlight and the sky a social taboo, they worshipped the Stone and constructed their society around castes and parliamentary, building massive underground networks known as the Deep Roads to conduct their business without the touch of the sky. This was strange, but not so strange to the elvhen as the fact they did not use magic at all, they did not even Dream. For that reason alone, they weren’t considered people, they were soulless, without consequence. Lower than even the weakest elf. Furthermore, for a people intrinsically linked to magic to the point that they could feel another’s emotions and intentions in the air, feeling nothing from this new people was…disturbing, all we had left to judge their character was words, and words are infamously easy to twist, obfuscate, and carry variable meaning. That led to bigotry, which inevitably led to war when earthquakes began destroying elvhen structures.”

“The blame was placed on the dwarves for a natural event?” He was glad they saw the absurdity. In truth, he still couldn’t wrap his head around the decision.

“More so on their beloved Stone, but if their deity was to blame, the worshippers were just as culpable. The elvhen descended into the earth led by eight powerful magic users, generals that concocted a plan to bring down the pillars of the Stone and halt the earthquakes permanently. Within the Stone they found Titans, creatures with immense size and power that were intrinsically linked to the Stone and gave it its life, and one was slain. What they found within the Titans was lyrium, their lifeblood and a raw material that carried incredible power which would later become a resource that was heavily sought after. The generals took this blood as their prize and began mining it from the corpse of their victim, returning to Elvhenan victorious.” He reached over and opened one of the boxes lain out on the War Table, selecting a vial of lyrium to show them. It made him uneasy to even indicate the potential power lyrium had to a group of unknowns, but its place within history was too significant to wash away.

“In its rawest state lyrium is toxic, deadly in many ways including but not limited to actual explosions if mined incorrectly. Once refined it can be used in medicines, tonics, potions, weapons, armor, runes; the list goes on. The most popular use for lyrium, and the most addictive, is consumption to heighten magical abilities; for this reason alone, it was taken and hoarded by the elvhen generals as their prize.” He put the vial away and closed the box, making sure it was out of reach of anyone before continuing to speak. “Upon their return the generals were celebrated as heroes, their magical prowess such that they were elevated to positions of quasi-royalty, given gifts, power, money, adulation, all in recompense for their bravery in the war.” He fished around the table for more map markers, selecting those he saw as appropriate and collecting them in his palm, putting others off to the side for later use. “They were incredibly powerful, even before the contact with lyrium, and in their new stations of power they took to playing an eternal Game of politics, secrecy, and lies to retain and increase their reach, as anyone would. It rapidly became problematic because of their lifespans; usually monarchies and other top-heavy power structures can be trusted to continue shifting with the death and replacement of the various heads, allowing for change, progress, and growth as a people, or so one would hope. In the absence of a guaranteed timeline to natural death, and a supply of power far beyond what most other elves could muster, the hierarchies were cemented as quasi-permanent afflictions of class.”

“No one thought to try and change anything?”

“No. On the outside all of this new power and structure was a good thing. People born during this age of prosperity were glad for the direction the generals gave the elvhen. Their corruption was slow, the forms of oppression and imbalance collecting over hundreds of years. I cannot say for certain they ever had good intentions for the elvhen, but I have been told they were not always as terrible as they became. The generals shifted from royalty to honored elders to gods. But they were never more than elves with fancy trappings and unending privilege given to them without thought…and it is for this reason that they were capable of truly terrible things. For ease of identification I will call them the Evanuris.” Mal’hari put down a starburst marker and a repurposed queen chess piece, setting them around the outside of the forest. He searched for the best words to describe them, eventually settling on the family dynamic to demonstrate how close the bonds truly were, and how much more likely it was that they all had such great power to begin with.

“At the head sat Elgar'nan and Mythal, husband and wife, father and mother. A deity of fatherhood, sunlight, and vengeance, and an arbiter of justice, motherhood, and protection in the tales. Their oldest twins, Falon’Din and Dirthamen, were said to walk in the realm of shadows and death. Falon’Din took precedence over death, fortune, and the passage of souls to the Beyond, Dirthamen tangled his hands in the webs of secrets and knowledge.” He placed a raven marker down for Dirthamen, face burning at the mere mention of his name. “Andruil, the first daughter and slayer of the Titan, presided over the hunt and all its thrills. Her sister Sylaise was considered a patron of the domestic arts, homemaking, and comfort. June, the youngest of the family, or Syalise’s husband, or both, was the master of craft, his mind was said to work as a labyrinth that even Dirthamen could not decipher.” Mal’hari rolled the second to last marker in his palm, the edges of the metal soft after years of worrying it through his fingers as he studied the positions of His agents in a war long past. A tiny wolf head carved into silverite; a trinket turned worry-stone.

“The only general not related to them, and the one who was arguably the most important among them was Fen’Harel. His place in all this is rather plain, he was mostly an underling to Mythal, a tamed wolf at her heel as she sat at the throne, but he walked among them as an arbiter of their eventual demise. These eight were joined by a ninth; Ghilan'nain, who was once a simple huntress of the People and elevated to ‘godhood’ by Andruil, possibly her lover, when she was betrayed and killed by another hunter out of jealousy. She became known as the mother of halla, monsters, and a guiding hand to travelers.”

“Why is he the most important?”

“He…he held a very large role in later history, mostly as a villain in stories told by my people. But in relation to the Calamity he is most important because I went to war with him, and it ended the world.” It was an overt oversimplification, a slap in the face to so many variables and minutiae and fine print, yet the blame fell on them all the same. They warred against each other and stayed blind to the true threat, and it left the world in ruin. Bulls clashing in a stable going up in flames.

“Why did you go to war?”

“Ideology, as complicated and intangible a subject as it is.”

“But arguably the most common reason for war, second only to resources.”

“True.” He organized the markers in a neat semi-circle, letting his hand linger near them. “The Evanuris had many willing worshippers; some gave themselves into the service of the Evanuris so wholly they allowed themselves to be marked with vallaslin, blood writing.” He motioned to his own face, expecting questions but receiving none. “It was the touch of a deity, a source of pride to show one’s marks, and a silent brand of utter servitude. These markings magically and intrinsically bound worshippers to the very will of the Evanuris; they could be compelled to act, speak, and think as their god commanded, and no one thought to deny them such power. Under these markings, elves gave of themselves anything the Evanuris wanted, submitting to any whim, any request, and any demand. This was twisted and manipulated thousands of times over, and the Evanuris grew inebriated with power and always sought for more. Fen’Harel saw this, amongst many other plights, and sought to free the People.”

“Is it a compulsion? Are you aware of it?”

“Not always, but there are overt facets to it that would be tangible. Were the owner of my markings to compel me to jump out the window and plummet to my death, I would. Were he to compel me to murder my entire family and light myself aflame afterwards, I would without question. In those cases I would feel and be aware of the compulsion and its incongruence with my own intentions, but I would be helpless to stop it. Things like thought and minor action, however, can be manipulated and I would never be aware. It would be as simple as never truly feeling unsettled by the idea I am an eternal slave or feeling contentment when hearing the name of my god spoken. If they wished for their followers to agree that dwarves and humans were not people and deserving of the horrific acts they wished to commit upon them, we would agree seamlessly. These marks run very, very deep, and it is insidious.”

“Did people know the markings would do that to them?”

“At first, no. And its possible the markings were initially, truly, a symbol of worship, but the Evanuris decided to ensure their followers would always follow and either created the geas later or intended it to be part of the design from the start.” Jacob’s brows drew downwards, his gaze shifting from his notes to Mal’hari.

“Your opponent is sounding a little more like a hero if he was putting an end to that kind of shackling.”

“He was at the time. He would have continued to be, had tales been kinder. But because the stories of the gods were passed on through oral history following the fall of Elvhenan, and my people were left with nothing but the desperation of a lost flock without a guiding hand, he was pointed to as the source of blame. For one of the Pantheon to tear their gods away from them, to leave them at the mercy of humans, was an act of utter betrayal. Thus, he became a villain.” The room went cold then, every human shifting in place as they realized their place in this history was of a villainous nature, Shepard carefully venturing out as she kept her gaze locked to his. Unafraid to confront the possibility of horrors committed by people who looked so like her.

“What did the humans do?”

“They were not the bringers of destruction, but they were…vicious carrion birds to the aftermath. As I have said, humans first arrived in Thedas from the north as a single tribe, the Neromenians. Their reasons for arrival were mysterious and some scholars believed they fled a terrible thing in their homeland and sought out safety across the Amaranthine Sea. We called them shemlen, quicklings that lived and died between the breaths of our immense selves. They were brash, barbaric, their short lives making them change in rapid and violent ways. Even worse, they had the capacity for magic, and bred like small animals; popping out six, seven, ten children and those children doing the same as quickly as a decade and some change later until their numbers ballooned and they spread, creating separate tribes and quickly expanding all over Thedas. Achieving so much in so little time that we were unable to keep up with them, to contain them as we had the dwarves. Those that remained in the north near Elvhenan came together under one leader and formed the Tevinter Imperium in the span of only 1,900 years, a breath compared to what we had done in several similar spans, who then brazenly reached out to the dwarves and started a lucrative trade of materials and knowledge, including lyrium.” He placed a marker on the main capital of the Imperium, marking a few others to show their reach.

“You speak as though you watched it happen.” Mal’hari looked to Thane, who did not shy away from his gaze, and smiled.

“I was two hundred years into my life when humans crossed into Thedas, and I was tasked with watching their progress, and sometimes killing those that were deemed too curious for their own good, under the behest of my…owner.”

“And who was that?”

“Dirthamen.”

“Did you...worship him?”

“No, I was besotted by June for a time, but I was never clever or literate enough to enter his domain. I was relegated to Dirthamen’s service as a child for my weak magical abilities and they used me as an experimental model.”

“What do you mean by child? How old is that, comparably?”

“I was…I think I was thirty-four. Proportionately, that is very young.” Their horrified silence spoke volumes, Jacob’s face mere seconds from a full snarl and Chakwas looking as though she was prepared to fight the next person that came near her.

“And you were just-what, snatched from your parents?”

“That was not an uncommon occurrence, but I was transient at the time. I was taken along with a group of streetlings that were unfortunate to come too close to a reaping, we were assessed and divvied up based upon what skills or services we could provide the Evanuris and shipped off to be marked and trained.”

“The reaping seems like it was a public affair if you could stumble into it. Did no one fight it?”

“They would end up dead if they tried, and in the eyes of most, it was an ascension to be taken into service. Unmarked elves were pitiable by nature and untrustworthy, unworthy of general compassion.” Shepard bit the inside of her cheek with enough force Mal’hari was surprised he did not see blood moments later, the muscles in her jaw clenching and unclenching several times before she spoke. 

“What did Dirthamen do to you? What experiment was he running?”

“Nothing personally. I never met him, in fact I was so low on the totem pole I rarely stepped foot within Elvhenan and spent my time out on the ground, taking orders from ravens. But his priests were given permission to use experimental methods to achieve the usual process of carving a vallaslin before sending me out into the wilds. I suppose they wished to take a page from the dwarven rules of existence and tried to harness the subversive power of complete separation from magic.” He reached up and tapped at the scar on his throat, using his prosthetic to avoid having to feel the ridges, grooves, and lines of the thick mark just above his collar bones. He could still taste the enchantment they used to silence him if he lingered on the memory. And he did not want to linger, not without a bottle of wine to fuzz the edges of the memory.

“Blood magic draws on the power within the mage instead of the Fade and gives them a slight edge, a boost in casting ability that allows for significant advancement in half the time. However, by drawing on one’s blood, the mage’s connection to the Fade is dampened, and over time they are forced to rely on their blood, or another’s blood, to cast their magic instead of pulling from the Fade. The more blood used, the more power you can wield, but the faster your connection to the Fade withers, which in turn motivates the mage to continue drawing blood or seeking it through other sources. It is not inherently corrupt, but it is considered a risky practice that has drawn more mages down a dark path than not. In my case, they used my blood and limited magical skill to power the ritual of carving the vallaslin instead of drawing upon the Fade themselves, letting me drain like slaughtered cattle and holding me above death until it was complete.” There was panic hedging at the back of his mind, but he shoved it away to be dealt with later, slowly unclenching his hand and letting it rest flat once again. It did not stop the shaking that had started beneath his skin, but it was enough for him to appear less bothered by the memory. He set Mythal’s marker on its side, drawing in a breath and continuing as if he’d digressed into a side topic, not one of severe trauma.

“As time wore on the Evanuris grew pettier, angrier, and fought amongst one another to grasp at strings of power in their Game. It grew so insidious that eventually Mythal was murdered by her own kin, throwing the whole system into disarray and Fen’Harel into despair. Fen’Harel…revered Mythal, from what I have been told, and she was considered the kindest of the tyrants, if there could be such a thing. In his grief Fen’Harel saw no other option to save the People but to banish the Pantheon, and so he tricked them into complacency while they were focused on subjugating the Tevinter Imperium, who had begun poking at the walls of Elvhenan and demanding entry. He developed a way to remove the vallaslin and its compulsion, and elves that wished to be freed flocked to him, granting him a network of individuals that spanned across all places, further even than Dirthamen’s Eyes. They placed conduits of his design across Thedas, and in the distraction caused by a siege lain by Tevinter against the walls of Elvhenan, he came here to Skyhold to begin preparations for his final plan.” If anyone had a problem with his rapid switch of topic, they did not speak, listening intently as he laid out the next sections of the plot. He motioned to the marker that signified Skyhold, adjusting its position slightly.

“Tevinter launched a siege against Elvhenan that lasted six years. The Imperium had developed skilled mages by this time and their society was built around a similar power structure to Elvhenan, mages at the top and others at the bottom. Their obsession with magic, and the ultimately powerful mage who was destined to lead Tevinter to glory, was such that they actively participated in selective breeding of various families to be the ones that birthed this mage. At the top of their society sat Magisters, skilled mages and well educated people that hailed from various top brass families and centuries of careful breeding. It is important to note the Magisters as they are billed as the reason the Taint now exists. In stories of the fall it is said that the Magisters lined hundreds and thousands of their slaves at the walls of Elvhenan, slit their throats, and used the combined blood sacrifice to force the very earth to swallow the city whole. The truth of the matter is less vilifying, and while blood magic was used to wage war against the elvhen, and to wage war against the Tevene forces, it was not the source of the collapse. Fen’Harel crafted a magical barrier, the Veil, over decades of research and planning that would seal the Evanuris away, breaking their grasp on the People and sentencing them to an eternal prison. When he raised the Veil the world as we knew it burned and was torn asunder. Much of elvhen construction was not solely in this plane, it existed in both simultaneously and was anchored by the ambient Fade energies. In the absence of that energy, most of the significant architecture was destroyed, entire constructs and places were wiped out of existence. What you saw of the Crossroads is a very fortunate and tiny remainder of the network that used to exist.”

“The place behind the eluvian?”

“Yes.”

“Why did it affect Shepard so violently?”

“There are spirits that are anchored in that plane to protect it and to stop unwanted presences from progressing within or ever exiting the Crossroads. I assume you felt them try to draw you in and make you want to remain?” Shepard pulled a face and shook her head, pointedly ignoring Chakwas’ intense focus on her.

“It...wasn’t as nice as just staying, they wanted me to die there.” 

“That is the...final goal of their purpose. For them to have implied it so bluntly is a sign they have degraded over time, as many of the spirits trapped in one plane do. The compulsion to stay despite needing food or water to live was designed to keep intruders from accessing any other eluvian or the places that they connected to. Elves are, technically, inherently acceptable and are not accosted unless the spirits deem their intentions untrue or they accessed the eluvian without the proper procedure. Humans and dwarves were universally banned, unless accompanied by an elf that could access the eluvian the correct way and protect them from the spirits.”

“And you couldn’t? You had a password.”

“I did have the correct knowledge to access that eluvian…and I could have stopped them from targeting you, but I decided against it. The intention was to see who was affected by the guardians and who was not.” Shepard gave him a long, wary look.

“My reaction was something you were looking for?”

“Yes. But not for wishing you harm, only to identify what you were. Your attire was strange and you carried stranger tools, my only defense was to draw you into a place where I had more control. The results were as I expected, for the most part.” 

“A reaction that volatile that fast is normal?” 

“Ignoring the state of the guardians, your reaction was one in line with a mage of average skill.”

“So a ‘non-mage’ would have lasted longer before stroking out?”

“Yes.”

“Are you implying I can use magic? Or that I’m connected to your Fade?”

“It’s quite possible you are, even if you are not aware of it. Were you to try to cast something under my guidance, you might succeed. Does Earth have magic?”

“Only the kind that involves pulling rabbits out of hats and coins from behind an ear.” He chuckled, nodding. “I do have bye-ohtiks, but that isn’t powered by drawing on another plane of existence.”

“Bye-ohtiks? Or optic, like an eye?”

“Biotics. Some people have the ability to create and manipulate mass effect fields. It’s an ability born from element zero exposure and the resulting development of nodes within the body that allows biotic manipulation, once there’s a modulator in place to control the flow. I’m a biotic, as are Thane and Miranda.”

“Are the fields elemental in nature?”

“No, it’s more...force. I can throw you without ever touching you, or I could slam a hand into the ground and make a shockwave knock you off your feet.” 

“Interesting. Can you use those abilities whenever you please? There is nothing that can dampen them or cut you off from them?”

“A concussion or severe injury might make it significantly harder to use them. It requires focus, a lot of it, so anything that breaks focus can halt the use, but other than that I don’t think anything can dampen them.” Shepard looked to Thane, and then Miranda for their input, both nodding in agreement with what she had said. 

“Do they impact your mental capacity? Your dreams?” Shepard’s face went through a complicated series of expressions, his question hitting the mark he knew it would. It was something to come back to later.

“No. Not me personally, anyway. Does magic?”

“Mental capacity, no. Dreams, yes.”

“How?”

“There are two kinds of dreams, one that is simply a result of a sleeping mind, and one that is accessing the Fade to varying degrees. Mages, when they sleep, dream within the Fade and can, with practice, interact with, and be interacted with, spirits. There is a danger in this, as your facets, good and bad, are open as a spirit’s are, and demons can feed on them or possibly cross over to possess a mage if they are given or force entry. Some mages, Dreamers or Somniari, are capable of manipulating and controlling the Fade while asleep, and they can seek out memories of the places they sleep within, echoes collected by the Fade and by the spirits that watch from the other side. Fen’Harel was one such Dreamer, and the first ruler of the Tevinter Imperium was as well.”

“Does that mean the Crossroads, since it houses spirits, is in the Fade?”

“Partially, the Crossroads are a pocket of the Fade pulled into this world and fashioned to allow travel across vast distances. That place is, from my understanding, anchored in this world and within the Fade by the eluvians, but it is otherwise not within either.”

“And all eluvians lead to the Crossroads?” 

“Not exclusively, some only use the Crossroads to facilitate movement from one side to the other, creating a doorway between two locations without the Crossroads in between. Some eluvian simply lead to others that have destinations, some allow immediate access to a place from the Crossroads, and some might simply be dead ends to confuse enemies. I have a map based on my travels, but it is unreliable at the best of times due to the lack of solid cardinal directions.”

“Seems like another version of the Deep Roads.”

“Yes, though I doubt many would compare the two for fear of lessening the ‘greatness’ of Elvhenan.” He offered a small smile and motioned back to the map, choosing to pick up where he left off. “In the confusion of the fall, elves fled to every corner they could, but most died in their attempt. Of the elves that survived, very few retained their ‘immortality’, and were brought low without magic or long life, they were soon preyed upon by the Tevinter Imperium who was in the market for as many slaves as they could get their hands on. Even fewer managed to escape that fate and turned to travelling, banding together in small groups to protect each other in the warring landscape.” He knocked over the rest of the markers save for Fen’Harel’s, and moved that one to Skyhold, pausing for any questions. “Fen’Harel, after expending his full magical power, was forced to rest and fell into a sustained coma, drawing sustenance from the Fade in a state of uthenera, a slumber that was used by elvhen who no longer wished to live their extended lives, and instead chose to leave their physical bodies and roam the Fade for their remaining eternity, suspended in time as little more than a sleeping body. This state supported him through the collapse, and he remained hidden for many centuries.”

“Did you do the same?”

“I had no such privilege or skill. I was on the battlefield defending Elvhenan along the eastern border of Qarinus at the time the Veil fell and was forced to flee in the resulting chaos. I crossed into a massive forest, possibly part of the Emerald Graves, or some place much farther that I have never been able to reach again. I remained there for about a century before braving travel back through the Crossroads and eventually finding my way back to Thedas. When I finally returned it, was to a world that had been ravaged by human greed. Tevinter’s slave trade had exploded with the sudden influx of elvhen bodies, too weak from losing both the Fade and their lifespans, and a hundred years had done more than enough to erase most memory of their ‘better’ beginnings. Our written language was almost entirely erased, and I only remember a bare few letters even now. The situation was only worsened when a group of seven Magisters, each a priest of an Old God, decided to attempt to enter the Golden City to claim godhood as their own.” He picked up the seven dragon markers, setting them out on the map carefully. “Now, according to the Tevinter belief system at the time, the Old Gods whispered from the Golden City to dreaming humans a few centuries after their arrival in Thedas, bestowing them with the gift of magic. Through the use of extreme blood magic and consuming incredible quantities of refined lyrium these magisters were able to physically enter the Fade despite the Veil and enter the Golden City; however, when they arrived the city was said to have been empty, the Maker’s throne desolate, and the city blackened and corrupted under their presence; they were then cast out and corrupted as the first Darkspawn for their sin, beginning the first Blight approximately 580 years after Elvhenan fell.” 

“You’re certain the Taint happened because of the Magisters?”

“I lean heavily on that version of events, though I’ve seen mentions of the Taint being present within places constructed before the Tevinter Imperium even existed, which may mean that it came from somewhere else. Others point to the possible existence of an alpha broodmother hidden so far within the Deep Roads that has been sending Darkspawn out for some unknown reason. But other sources point very clearly at the seven Magisters, so it is hard to say.”

“Broodmother? What is that?” He grimaced, struggling to find a tact way of describing them.

“They were once women of any species who were corrupted so completely by the Taint that they give natural birth to Darkspawn.” He met Shepard’s gaze with great reluctance, her mouth clenched tight enough he was certain her teeth may crack if she shifted her jaw wrong.

“Is that something brought on from being Tainted and also female, or is there more that goes into it?”

“What notes I have found on the process were vague. If you wish to read them, I will provide them to you, but I would prefer not to speak of it myself.” 

“Because I’m a woman?” 

“Were that the case I would fear more for the men in this room, Commander. I choose not to because the whole of the process is horrific, and to continuously regale you with such details would only exhaust you instead of drive home how terrible the Taint is.”

“Fair enough. How long did first Blight last?”

“Approximately two hundred years, and it nearly destroyed everything. The conflict sparked the creation of the Grey Wardens, a group of conscripted individuals who were willingly Tainted and thrown at the Darkspawn ad nauseum until one or the other dropped dead. It was only by some stretch of luck that the Grey Wardens were able to discover how to defeat the Archdemon in time.” He knocked one of the dragon tokens over, setting it at the Silent Plains to signify the location of the first victory.

“And Archdemons are…harbingers of the disease?”

“To a point. An Archdemon is, as I have come to believe, a Tainted Old God.”

“How can a god be Tainted?”

“By committing a sin themselves. In the canon of the Chantry faith the Maker turned his back on spirits, and in their jealousy some incredibly powerful spirits began whispering to the living through the Fade to convince them that they were, in fact, the true creators and they should be worshipped. The living mustered the courage to summon these gods and pulled them from behind the Veil, the spirits then took the shape of great dragons in our world and exercised their might. The living were in awe, and began worshipping them instead of the Maker, which is the ‘original sin’. In his fury the Maker cursed the Old Gods and sentenced them to an eternal slumber beneath the earth. Now, there are several things within that tale that have been verified as truly happening. One, it was well acknowledged that all magic is born from dreams within the Fade, so it is plausible the humans awakened their magic through the Fade from the guidance of incredibly powerful spirits. Two, there is well documented worship of the Old Gods dating back to around the time this canon is indicating, particularly in Tevinter writings and inscriptions. Three, the Old Gods, ancient high dragons, were verifiably hibernating in prisons deep within the earth. A Blight begins when the Darkspawn find one, wake it, Taint it, and then fall under its control. Four, the first Blight was a direct following to the highest point of Old God worship within Tevinter, and individuals that can be directly linked to the group of seven have been found or defeated in some capacity, meaning these mages did at least exist, and were somehow corrupted by the Taint when it first came to our notice.” 

“And a Blight only starts when an Archdemon is Tainted?” 

“Yes, and it only ends when the god is permanently slain, beginning a Thaw. The difficulty of slaying an Archdemon is in its ability transfer its soul to another Tainted creature, allowing it to subsist after the death of its body, and so a Grey Warden must…accept the soul of the Archdemon into their own and allow the Beyond to consume them along with it.”

“There’s no other way?”

“Not that we could conceive. The secret to killing an Archdemon was closely guarded, the Grey Wardens did not want it known that a person could take on the soul of one to avoid any mages or others trying to take the soul for their own purposes.”

“How did the Grey Wardens know when to hunt down an Archdemon? It seems like it’d just catch everyone off guard.”

“They hear a Calling as the Darkspawn do, a song within them that draws them towards an Old God that seeks to be awakened, which they then used to warn others and prepare for the coming fight.”

“And if there’s only been five then it’d be reasonable to assume only two are left. Do you know where they’re buried?”

“They are no longer buried, but I have found documentation of two past prisons from other Archdemon that have since woken and been slain. One resided under a mine in the Western Approach and another was beneath the Heidrun Thaig.” He marked the two areas with random tokens. “From what records I could access from the Grey Warden’s libraries, those that have been slain are Dumat, Zazikel, Toth, Andoral, and Urthemiel. The last two, Razikale and Lusacan, remain at large.” He set two dragons near Skyhold, placing the rest in spots where he had read of their reported demises.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to find the Old Gods and kill them before they woke? Eliminate the chances of them being Tainted in the first place?”

“Absolutely, many people saw the Wardens as ineffectual because they did not take the most obvious path to victory. The Grey Wardens even knew where all seven were buried, but the prisons were so deep within the earth, and so inundated by roaming Darkspawn, that it was impossible to fight to them without risking a complete erasure of their own forces in the process. Furthermore, they were not the most popular with the ruling families over the ages due to their Rite of Conscription, which was a compulsory letter of service that could be handed to anyone, at any social level, and they would be compelled to join and revoke all their previous lands and titles for eternity. So while people wanted to use the Grey Wardens as a shield, they were not willing to actually help them achieve that goal. As a result, any preventative measures were weak at best, and with the number of wars, political shifts, rebellions, and various problems on the surface…most people weren’t overly worried about the Blights when they weren’t happening. It was that ignorance, along with the crumbling of the Grey Wardens during my time as Inquisitor, that led to the Calamity. When the last two Archdemons woke at the same time and came to the surface together it was only a matter of time until everything fell apart. Without the Grey Wardens and with a war waging between myself and Fen’Harel, there was no chance of weathering the storm.”

“What happened to the Grey Wardens?”

“Their order was ripped apart due to unrest caused by separate events, events that led to my ascension as Inquisitor, incidentally.” He carefully cleared away the markers and prepared to start anew, selecting two of the stronghold markers and placing one over Haven and another over the Temple of Sacred Ashes. “This series of events began approximately 1,900 years ago, so we are skipping forward quite a bit and missing a significant part of human history on Thedas. There had been a rebellion by mages, who over time had been turned into little more than prisoners of the church in an institution called the Circle of Magi, touted as a college, but that acted more as a repository to keep them locked away and out of sight. Mages had been severely maltreated, and depending on the Circle, completely violated under the hands of the Templars ordered to keep them in check. Templars, a force of soldiers trained to dampen magic using power bestowed to them through lyrium in the absence of magical ability, were deliberately addicted to consuming lyrium by the Chantry to keep them loyal, which created its own prison and string of abuses. Strains between the two forces became so violent that a group of mages overthrew the system in Kirkwall, leading to a wave of further rebellions across Thedas as the mages fled, becoming apostates.” He marked Kirkwall with a sunburst, tipping it over. “The Divine of the Chantry, the highest religious leader of the church, Justinia the fifth, saw a chance for progress and positive change, resolving to create a more equal agreement between mages and Templars at a Conclave that occurred four years after the Kirkwall uprising.” He indicated the Temple, sighing. “I went to this Conclave as a spy to listen in on the decision and deliver news of the outcome to my clan; however, there was an explosion and the Divine was killed, leaving a massive hole in the very fabric of the Veil. I was pegged as the murderer when it was found that I was the only survivor, and the bearer of magic that would later consume my left hand. The Right and Left Hands to the Divine, Cassandra Pentaghast and Seneschal Leliana, took me into custody and attempted to determine the source of this explosion. In the mess that followed, I managed to temporarily close the Breach and stop the immediate threat, which then led to my appointment as Herald of Andraste after the story of how I walked out of the Fade with a glowing woman behind me caught like wildfire.” Shepard grimaced at that, sympathy crossing her face. There was something else to her expression, but he could not decipher it with his focus placed so heavily upon getting the sequence of events correct. 

“The rift in my left hand would have expanded and killed me if not for an elven hedge mage, Solas, who had a strange propensity for austere magic and became an integral part of my advisory circle as the battle grew more complicated and plots from multiple sources were found. The Breach was not the only tear in the Veil and the instability was causing chaos, so for a time the Inquisition’s mission was closing the smaller tears and finding enough magical support to completely seal the Breach, once that was completed we were made aware of who, and what, had caused the explosion. The Elder One, a mysterious center of a cult that had grown in Tevinter over the years, had somehow managed to corrupt members of the Grey Wardens and convince them to betray the Divine at the Conclave. The Elder One had wished to use the Divine’s blood to conduct a ritual to unlock an artifact of incredible power that had found its ways into his hands through the behest of various agents. As he was not the owner of the artifact and had no idea how to handle it, his attempt to unlock it was met with a violent release of magical energy, and we assumed the Elder One perished in the explosion along with everyone else. I happened upon this attempted murder and tried to protect the Divine, grasping the artifact as it was unlocked and the explosion quite literally punched a hole between realms in my hand, creating the mark that I employed to seal rifts and the Breach. We later found that the Elder One was a magister, Corypheus, who claimed he had been one of the seven that walked into the Golden City and wanted to attempt the same jump again to claim the empty throne himself and become god.”

“Were his claims true?” 

“We found evidence he was of a very old family in Tevinter, and the name Corypheus only could be referenced back to around the same time as the first Blight. Most of my advisory circle, myself included, leaned on the assumption he had walked into the Golden City. He, however, insisted the city was already blackened by the time they arrived, which would indicate an earlier corruption behind the Veil than their presence could have created.” 

“Did you believe him?”

“I...have been investigating the truth of his words. But it is difficult to devote much energy to it, as he was entirely unhinged, as all the Magisters in his group likely were. And before the Calamity his threat was legitimate, and he was enabled by an artifact of the Evanuris alongside his ability to manipulate Tainted creatures. The Inquisition’s goal became taking Corypheus down, my position rising from Herald to Inquisitor following our arrival here, having needed to flee from Haven when Corypheus laid siege to it to get to me.”

“And Fen’Harel was here? Asleep?”

“No. Fen’Harel was…Fen’Harel had woken a year or so before and was shocked to find that the result of his actions had left the world in disrepair, the People he had sought to save were still slaves blindly praying to the Evanuris. There was so little magic it was as if he was surrounded by dolls and mannequins, no one felt of anything. It was empty, soulless, and irreparably wrong, and he decided to rip the Veil down, return magic and the Fade to its rightful place amongst us. To do that, he needed power, but he was weak from uthenera and was blocked by his own creation. The Evanuris had, in the past, encapsulated parts of their power in orbs called foci, leaving them for when they needed it or to gift them to those they saw worthy. He let his foci fall into Corypheus’ hands along with whispers of its power to tantalize him, letting madness and greed do the rest while waiting in the wings for him to pop it open. He had planned to swoop in in the aftermath of the explosion and snag the artifact to reclaim his power, then rip down the Veil while we were scrambling to understand what had occurred. But Corypheus, impossibly, survived the explosion, lingering in the tainted blood of the Wardens he had manipulated and reformed himself, taking the now activated foci with him and leaving Fen’Harel high and dry, as it were. To further insult him, he later learned that I, a lowly Dalish elf in his eyes, had stolen all his power and stuffed it into a hole in his palm that was being waved around like a child carrying a rattle. And thus, plans changed, he used his agents to manipulate the Inquisition into taking Skyhold and building enough power to take on Corypheus, intending to wait until we had killed him to take the orb and continue on as originally planned.” He rolled his shoulders and looked away from them, running his thumb along the tiny seams of the prosthetic’s palm. “He was very close the whole time, and even with my centuries of knowledge and wariness, I had been blind, and he hid in plain sight as any good liar does.”

“He joined you.”

“He did more than join, Commander. He stood across the table from me and advised me for the better part of a year, he shared his knowledge and had a voracity for history and lore that could only be matched by a collegiate professor, he painted the atrium because he could not enjoy the staleness of the walls, and he lay in my bed for many nights, and remained by my side after we separated. Fen’Harel was one of my closest friends.” He bit the inside of his lip, squeezing the wrist of his prosthetic until his knuckles went white. “I have no excuse for being blind. When you stand in the face of a storm you are desperate to find an eye within it that allows you space enough to breathe. I found that in him and I could not bear to expect betrayal from the body beside mine in bed, so I looked the other way when aspects of his story never matched up. When things he said made it feel as though I was back in Elvhenan listening to a thousand voices diagnose soullessness upon an entire race of people. Solas, Fen’Harel, both, whoever he was, used my hesitance to his advantage, as he did the rest of his costume to disarm many suspicions that were aimed his way. By the time we had defeated Corypheus he was the furthest threat in my mind, and he vanished without a trace after the victory. I had assumed he fled because he was an apostate and feared the coming tide of prison, and I could not begrudge him for seeking refuge now that his duty was complete. He certainly was not beholden to me.”

“Did you put the pieces together then?” 

“No, no. It took me a damned year to put it all together. I knew Fen’Harel’s agents existed, this little wolf token was pulled off a mage that tried to reactivate one of his conduits in the Hinterlands at the start of the Inquisition. Over the centuries I had guessed he had escaped the collapse of Elvhenan, the stories of him smacked more of ‘sole survivor’ than ‘twisted mastermind’. I feared Solas may have been one of them given some of his rhetoric when I looked back on it, but there were still rifts, politics, and battles to fight so my focus was not placed on a bad break up in the face of war. Ferelden and Orlais suddenly came out of their shells realized that I had legitimate political power and threw a fit because people not only respected that power but recognized that we were the only ones who really tried to fight against the Breach where they tucked tail and hid. They announced that there needed to be an Exalted Council to decide whether the Inquisition would be allowed to continue now that our duty was complete, resolving to erase us not a year and a half after the Breach was closed. During that Council I was confronted with the reality of Solas’ plan to tear down the Veil, which inevitably put us on opposite sides of a particularly divisive issue that had hundreds of thousands of lives on the table.”

“You were sure the Veil falling would kill everyone?”

“Solas confirmed that would be the case. The world had grown to lean on the Veil as a form of support to fill the structural vacuum left by the Fade when it was separated. Similarly, people adapted to live and learn and function without an omnipresent force beside and within them. To pull every support beam away at once and flood the world would cause a complete collapse of realities, the smallest consequence of which would be an utter annihilation of life.”

“How does that constitute an ideological difference? That sounds...fundamental. Deeply fundamental.”

“It would have been, had I not agreed with, and still agree with, much of the rest of what he had to say. This world, this society, was rife with horrible people. Everyone at the top got there by lying, killing, abusing, and oppressing my people and others for their own gain. I could regale you with the number of funny stories nobles have shared with me of little servant girls and boys of all races used for their virgin flesh before being tossed out like candy wrappers once they’d had their fun. The whole system _deserved_ to be ripped to the ground and burned.” He looked down at the map, chewing his lip for a moment, pulling back his rage before it broke through entirely. Perhaps being alone for so long had done more damage to his civilized self than he had initially thought, if something as simple as talking had him seeing red. Mal’hari pulled in a breath and clenched his jaw, giving Shepard an apologetic look before continuing, forcing himself to remain measured and calm.

“I would have gladly been a harbinger of change, the face of rebellion, but I was not willing to put my coin down on a bill that required the deaths of innocents. Solas could not see past the glaring issue of all these ‘innocents’ growing up in a world that created inherent biases and preconceptions that would continue the injustices on for generations after legislation and basic structural change was put in place, and that was not acceptable. He was right to point out that children would keep being imprisoned, slaves would be violated, mages abused, men tortured, privilege hoarded by the few at the top, and words on paper would do nothing to change that in the immediate future. He accepted such rapid change would require violence, but it would bring more significant results and ensure that those results were exactly what he wanted instead of leaving gradual change up to chance.”

“There was no talking him out of it? Even though you were friends? Even though you’d been...more?”

“Oh, there were many talks. He and I spent cumulative months of the war standing across from each other at this very able arguing politics and ethics and any number of philosophical topics that I have no education to participate in, but we never came to an accord even when I presented a number of ways to create meaningful and lasting change. We were so focused on butting heads, so prideful and determined to be right that when the Calamity came...no one was prepared. Worse, there was no warning, the Grey Wardens had imploded and left nothing behind for us to defend ourselves with and the dwarves were the first to suffer, as they always had been.”

“The Deep Roads…”

“Yes, the dwarves had been, for all intents and purposes, toiling under one sustained Blight ever since the first inception of it. Where we were fortunate to have a Thaw, they were beleaguered with an influx of Darkspawn that fled underground to lick their wounds. When both Archdemons awoke, Orzammar, one of the remaining dwarven capitals, essentially fell overnight and with it the remainders of dwarven society. With the lack of a lyrium trade from underground the Templar forces were cut off from their supply, which quickly liquefied the remaining ranks when withdrawal and lyrium madness set in. Orlais went on the defensive and pulled its troops back to protect the main places of power, Val Royeaux and Halamshiral, which left the Orleasian countryside exposed to the Darkspawn for the taking. Razikale laid waste to it all, she brought waves of emissaries, intelligent and magically capable darkspawn, with her to ravage the Templar-less lands within the first year. Lusacan took to Ferelden, targeting the largest outposts and military bastions first before circling around to begin decimating what remained. Ferelden was lucky to have less in the way of permanent infrastructure and a centralized place of power, but it suffered in that much of the military might was relegated to regular men and volunteers under the Chantry. Their resources were so tied up in fighting that the rest of Thedas suffered, and once organized travel was made impossible, we were destined to starve. Antiva, Nevarra, and Rivain, from what I can surmise, took to the ocean, their navies were substantial enough that an exodus was viable, Razikale capitalized on the condensed populations as she had in Orlais and snuffed them out. Tevinter, already embroiled in a war of their own and a slave rebellion to boot, collapsed under the weight of both Archdemons descending upon them. In total it took less than five years for everything to come undone.”

“That’s it? All of that in five years?”

“When you take a sledgehammer to a weakened wall, it does not take very long for the rest of the building to come down. Even faster when the wood is rotting from within.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried organizing for the first year, I called back as many allies that were willing to rejoin me, brought in every favor I had, opened debts to any number of people to get food and supplies smuggled to Skyhold en masse. I dried out the vault paying whatever scalping price smugglers asked, if only to get the materials needed to weather a veritable hurricane. When it became apparent there would be no salvaging what remained I tasked my two best mages with the stasis magic and began funnelling people towards the keep. Fen’Harel and his agents all but vanished, and those I did see did not linger long. When Tevinter collapsed I made a final effort to contact him, and when I was met with silence, I closed the gates indefinitely.” 

“How many people did you manage to save?”

“Save is...a relative term, Commander. I managed to imprison some 850 people alongside my inner circle of advisors, mostly folk who had fled to the Inquisition over the course of its rise to seek out protection from the rebellion. I’m sure you’ve noticed there is a marked lack of viable farmland or available grazing space for livestock to flourish, and the one well that is available taps into a reservoir of mountain water that will eventually become stale. This castle was a slower death than the outside, and many knew it the moment we were locked in together.”

“Did people not know of the eluvian? That seems like the most logical option to smuggle people and goods.”

“Yes, it would have been had its, and others like it, existence not been a secret held by a scant few people. Those mirrors were little more than myth to many, and it allowed me to slip in and out to survey the progress of the world without risking scouts to do the job conventionally. I hoped to use it to possibly contact Fen’Harel or his people, to establish a ceasefire and build a network to save lives, but I have had no luck no matter where I go to look.” Mal’hari let out a long, tired sigh, resting his weight on the table and letting his posture slip. He was exhausted, as he was sure the others were, but resting would have to wait. Giving them this information was the tip of the iceberg, getting them to leave the mess alone afterwards would be the real trick. 

“Our only hope was to design a way to allow a mass of people to survive without requiring material sustenance for as long as possible. My mind, as I’m sure yours has, immediately turned to replicating uthenera without requiring sleep. WIthout written instructions for the process, and no personal experience with it, my mages had to build the enchantments from the ground up with limited resources. The stasis magic took decades to arrive at a point that would possibly work the way it was intended. The fact the field has not only lasted, but remained exactly as it was supposed to, after all these years is a stroke of luck the size of your galaksee. It was reverse engineered from a spell that my mages only saw for a brief moment before the caster let it fall and proceeded to turn to dust before them. By the time the runes had been set, our numbers had dwindled to less than a quarter, and despite their combined prowess...my mages...my friends could not stop the passage of time entirely. It was an imperfect waking uthenera, regardless of their efforts to perfect it in the time it afforded them afterwards.” There was a resounding, mournful silence that filled the room, one he dared not interrupt. He was somewhat surprised by the amount of sympathy these people were capable, despite not knowing anyone he spoke of it seemed as though they felt their loss just as deeply as he had. As he still was. Mal’hari offered them a small smile, gently tapping one of the map markers against the table.

“I would hope you did not expect anything from this but melancholy.” Chakwas seemed the only one brave enough to speak, her eyes slightly reddened and her notes lowered. She had not gestured at her orange panel for some time, and he was sure she would curse her compassion for it later. 

“It’s what was expected, but that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge the possibility your situation could be better than it looks on the outside.”

“Of course. You would not have asked your questions without such hope.” He caught Shepard’s uncomfortable shift in his peripheral, finding himself surprised to see utter contempt playing across her features, though not directed at him. Directed inwards. It was a situation he recognized and knew all too intimately. And so he asked the worst, and most annoying question for someone actively spiralling into a mess of projected problems and solutions. 

“Are you alright, Commander?” 

“No. I’m fucking pissed.” Mal’hari was quite surprised she was honest with him, the strange use of a verb and an adjective for drunkenness aside. Based on the look Miranda was giving her Commander, she was also very surprised. 

“I’m going to assume that means you are very angry.” 

“Yes.”

“You have very little reason to be.” 

“There could have been help. There are forces outside the Alliance that were space faring during the time when you could have gotten aid and-” 

“And I’m sure they might have done all the wonderful things you hope they would given the infinitesimal chance they happened upon this place as you did. Would you be so willing to think these other forces would be kind and charitable if I told you the pounds and pounds of gold and silver coins I have stashed away in this place? Of the jewels and pearls and other uselessly expensive gifts? If they happened upon my lyrium stores and discovered its power? If they saw all the resources of these lands, abandoned, empty, and one crippled man sitting on top of it acting like he owned it? As altruistic as people can be, Shepard, I do not think they would be, given what I have here. You cannot shoulder the blame for something that could not have been helped a hundred years ago, much less a thousand or four thousand or ten thousand. This was an unsalvageable situation, and one that was not entirely undeserved.”

“You can’t honestly believe that all this is completely justified punishment.” He flashed his teeth in a smile that was more a snarl, allowing himself a small moment of genuine, cold, rage. 

“I’m _furious_ at the results of my labor. I did not sacrifice, bleed, traumatize, and break myself for centuries only to be rewarded with a full pisspot. But I understand the poetic justice of it.”

“So that’s it? You’re going to let this be the end?”

“Of course not. I haven’t wasted my years wandering these halls and feeling sorry for myself. It’d be an insult to those that afforded me the time. I have been researching and compiling data in the event Fen’Harel, or some other entity returns to the stage.” 

“But not us.” 

“No, not you.” 

“Why? You tell us all that and then you expect nothing? After everything you’ve seen us do?”

“I would not expect you to participate in a war you quite literally stumbled into. Further, I can’t reasonably wish for you to just solve all my problems because you are a convenient solution, particularly when I have nothing to give in return.”

“Yes, but I came down here with the intention to help.”

“Which is a truly kind gesture, but one I cannot accept.”

“Again, why? What do you have to lose?”

“Nothing, not any more. But you and those that follow you do, and I will not use that as my line of credit when the bill comes due. Your lives aren’t mine to gamble with; if you choose to play this game, then so be it, but I will never ask or beg for you to do so.” Shepard, despite her poise, was beginning to look frustrated, and Jacob was beyond annoyed by his continuous dodging of a freely offered salvation. It was frustrating even to him, but there was nothing else. Not with the plan he’d settled on. 

_Creators_ , Solas truly had rubbed off on him. 

“I’m starting to see why you two never came to an agreement.” He could not have stopped the snort that left him, a smile breaking across his face.

“I’ve been told we were insufferable.” Despite his brief levity the room descended into yet another somber silence, members of the crew exchanging glances and muttered questions before he chose to speak again. He and Shepard shared a long, searching look, her burning coal eyes flickering between focus and haze as she tried to puzzle out the pieces he had thrown at her.

“May I ask if you have decided on a course of action, Commander?” Shepard let out a breath that seemed to carry the weight of iron, her shoulders dropping before she righted her posture and met his gaze with new determination.

“I have. I’ll need to speak with my team to get a solid plan down, but I’ve got an idea of what I want to do with all this. I think with a new perspective on things I’ll be able to come up with a better solution to this problem.” 

“I look forward to seeing it, Commander.” Mal’hari had an inkling of what conclusion she would arrive at. It was, after all, the only logical one left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It'll get happier I swear


	8. Las : Anticipation | Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *walks in two months late with Starbucks* I have no excuse.
> 
> Thank you to those who are sticking around for this crazy story, the kudos and comments keep me going even when I'm not on my game. <3

Shepard’s head was pounding. She’d only started the process of absorbing everything Mal’hari had explained, and on the outset everything he’d said made sense, it slotted into place with what she and Thane had seen within the castle, particularly the areas with masses of sleeping bags tucked into corners and beds crammed side to side in spaces where there was none. A refugee effort gone horribly wrong. But the fact there were no _bodies_ to evidence the death of approximately 850 people in an enclosed space made it hard to trust Mal’hari was telling the whole truth. Even a thousand years of decomposition would leave something behind; graves, markers, the odd bone or mummified corpse. But there was nothing, no sign of burials in the hard packed earth, no evidence of an extensive catacomb system beneath the castle, no headstones or urns or pyres. And for someone who was, actively or acting like, grieving, it was strange to do it with no evidence of anyone ever having actually died in their presence. There had to be something he wasn’t telling them, she could feel it. 

“Would you take offense if I asked a question about your mental state?” 

“No, it’s entirely plausible to be worried if I am sane after the tale I just weaved.” 

“It’s not a concern of sanity, part of the medical analysis was to determine how connected you were with reality, and you passed with flying colors. However, I’m not going to pretend that we didn’t just sit through three hours of you spitting out personal traumas without pausing for air.” Mal’hari flashed another soulless grin, the expression making it look more like he was dying inside than truly smiling. It wasn't any less unsettling now that she had context.

“I appreciate the consideration, but I will be fine.” 

"Meaning you aren't now."

"Clever, and no, I am not "fine", no one would be in my position. But today has been quite eventful and you can't blame me for being a little stressed." 

“Forgive me if I call bullshit.” That startled a laugh out of him, his face pulling into an expression of confused glee at the curse. She’d have to figure out what it sounded like to him later, but for the moment it was sufficient in stopping the dead eyed look he’d been standing with for the past hour. 

“You are a terrible diplomat.” It was said more as a compliment than anything else, which gave her some sense of satisfaction. Shepard tended to take inordinate pleasure in spitting on the mandates of the social elite, and it never ceased to frustrate the Illusive Man, which was the second best thing in the world. The fact someone else seemed to not only enjoy that defiance, but understand it enough to find it funny, was great. 

“Fully aware, that’s why I leave the talking to Miranda, she’s got the brains of this operation.” 

“Good of you to finally admit it, Commander.” Miranda sounded exasperated, but the tone was greatly muted by the current circumstances. “I will agree with her bluntness, however. To ignore the effects of not only being put in contact with people after being alone for the better part of two millennia, and then suffering through the emotional trampling you did, would be irresponsible.” Mal'hari's expression did not outwardly change, but something in his expression, or his body language, suggested otherwise, Thane tapping his thumb twice against the small of her back. _Lie._ She just couldn't figure out what Thane saw that suggested that particular fact was a farce. 

“I am fully capable of coping with a little exposure, in fact, this gives me an opportunity to finally open a bottle of wine I’ve been neglecting.” He raised a hand as several of them bristled at the response, preemptively countering their concern. “But I do not cope with alcohol. If you would like to share the bottle to ensure I don’t down the whole thing to wash this out, you are more than welcome; assuming you can tolerate fermented grapes and peaches.” 

"It may not seem like it is without a second pair of eyes on it." Another smile, another tap, more insistent than before. She looked harder for signs of lying, things Thane had tried to teach her using various videos and materials when they spent sleepless nights together in his quarters instead of hers. Shifting focus, avoidance of eye contact, nervous fidgeting, sweat on the brow, a tightness in the limbs, even shallow breathing. But she saw nothing. It dawned on her then that Thane was _worried_ , his fingers digging into her back slightly as he kept his outward composure. Someone else had to be here that she hadn't seen, or Mal'hari himself was giving off enough of a vibe that Thane was getting…concerned. Not spooked. If he was spooked, she would have at least caught on to why. She cast a glance around the room, doing her best to look surprised when she realized the sun was dying through the window behind Mal'hari. There wasn't anyone else around. 

But were spirits visible? 

That thought gave her chills, but she was far better at hiding her fear than her anger, and Mal'hari didn't seem to notice her train of thought, instead turning his attention to the window and letting out an infuriatingly composed ‘ah’ of surprise.

"It is getting late. If you wish, you may speak with your team in the main hall while I find suitable fuel for the torches. The castle is difficult to navigate in the dark and the sheer number of staircases you can throw yourselves down is staggering. I’d hate to find you died from something as simple as a flight of stairs." It wasn't a threat, but the humor was...flat. The humor of a man trying desperately to act like he was fine. The brand of humor she excelled at. 

"Do you want help?"

"If you feel you can spare someone, and are comfortable leaving them alone with me, then perhaps. The task is not overly difficult." She chose to ignore the small out he had given her, glancing to the others. No one made an immediate offer, but she didn't see any extreme looks of discontent at the idea, either. In the presence of no further complaints, Mal'hari sighed and took the box of lyrium vials from its spot on the stack of books to his right, tucking it under his arm and motioning for them to begin exiting. Miranda took initiative and turned to leave first, followed closely by Jacob and Chakwas, though with some hesitance in the latter party. Mordin finished up his notes and closed them out before leaving, her omni-tool flashing a notification that she'd received a message not moments later. It gave her a good enough excuse to avoid further eye contact as she turned and left the room, Mal'hari's voice fading behind her.

"Thane, I was hoping you would tolerate a purely childish question from someone who very clearly isn’t a child." She didn't catch Thane's response, her attention fixed solely on the message Mordin had left for her.

 _Second person resides in castle, blonde human male, very thin, possibly teen to young adult. Will help with torches and investigate._ Shepard chewed on her lip as she passed into the main hall, throwing a look to Mordin and forcing herself to nod in agreement. The plan made enough sense that she couldn’t argue against it outright. Mordin was already outwardly interested in their host, which meant a chance to be alone to ask a battery of questions would be a logical step for him to take now that they had a veritable mass of information to process, and since Mordin had observed the medical examination he’d likely want answers for things now that they had established viable contact. It just scared her to start the process of poking holes in the most obvious lies before they knew how their host would react to being called out for said lies. She felt Thane's approach more than she heard it, a small piece of comfort accompanying him as he settled in on her right, far enough away to indicate her status, but still close enough to be there for her. The 'dance of secretive intimacy' as Mordin had called it. Mal'hari was not far behind him, no longer carrying the case of lyrium she noted, and currently focused on rolling up his sleeves. The arm, despite not coming up in initial discussion, was a priority on her list of further questions. It operated smoother than any proximate version she'd seen across multiple planets and stations, and it looked like it'd been pulled off an old suit of armor and retrofitted instead of being built from the bottom up to his exact specs, as would be the case in their environment. Shepard managed to avoid looking like she was outright staring at his arm, but Mal'hari noticed her attention and cast her a small smile, flexing the hand on the prosthetic once he'd finished rolling up his sleeves. 

"Yes, Commander?" 

"How much of the castle needs lighting?"

"The main hall, mostly, and then a few of the surrounding halls and the atrium libraries. Am I right in assuming the metal torches you carry can last for...seven to eight hours? Until sunrise?"

"Not running continuously, but we can use them when we need to and not worry about them dying on us."

"Good. How do those die, exactly?” 

“Their power source runs out.” 

“Oil?” 

“Uh...batteries.” Mal’hari’s face twisted in confusion, one ear dipping down and the other twitching upwards. It almost reminded her of a puppy, in a way. 

“It’s powered by assault?” 

“No, no. A battery is a contained cell of electricity, once the electric charge runs out it can’t power the flashlight, so the light dies.” 

“I see."

"I honestly don't know how they work beyond that, it's a technology we sort of take for granted."

"I…suppose it would be, if you can fly at will." 

"Is there something you take for granted? Or did?" He snorted.

"Externally locked windows." Shepard swore she heard Thane snort, but the sound was so small, so faint, it couldn't possibly have been him. "And sconces. You would be surprised how tiring it is to lug around a torch or a lantern when you need to see. Speaking of which, I should get to lighting them before we end up walking around in the dark." 

"Would like to help, process interests me." She looked to Mordin, his gaze locked on Mal'hari, who was looking back with an unreadable expression. Shepard couldn’t tell whether he knew he’d been had, or if the prospect of being alone with Mordin so soon was unsettling to him. 

"I won't stop you, I guess. Is that alright?" 

"Of course. It's not every day I get to discuss primitive technology." He grinned, the expression full of teeth and not much else, Mordin smiling in return and making to follow when he was beckoned. Shepard deliberately turned her back as they crossed off through the door that led to the gardens, letting silence encompass the group for all of two seconds before speaking in a rush.

"Hands up, who believes him?" She was surprised when three out of four available hands went up, though Miranda's was at half-mast compared to the others. "Who wants to go back to the Normandy?" Both Jacob and Chakwas dropped their hands, another expected response.

"I would prefer to be on-board to offer overhead support. If we are really staying to investigate further, then I want to keep an eye on everything else. The Illusive Man will want to know why you’ve stopped off here, if he hasn’t already started investigating the coordinates.” That gave Shepard pause, a wall of dread rising in her stomach. She hadn’t thought about the Illusive Man, or his obsessive eye on her every move. 

“Shit. I didn’t even think of him when we came down.” 

“Of course not. We’ll need an excuse for why we came down here, other than resources, intelligence, malfunctions, or curiosity.” 

“Just eliminate all the viable excuses, why don’t you…” Miranda gave her an unsympathetic look, tilting her head ever-so-slightly to the left. “Could we pull off the old ‘got a ping, got stuck’ excuse?”

“Pinged off what exactly? And there would need to be logs of a ping in EDI’s database to prove it.” 

_‘I can fabricate a radiological ping; wayward radiation readings are quite common in this area and we have investigated far more dangerous locales on less than a radioactive blip. And the weather patterns are unpredictable enough that a long-term grounding scenario is not out of the realm of possibility.’_

“Thank you, EDI.” 

_‘My pleasure, Commander. Shall I fabricate a ping?’_ Shepard gave Miranda ample time to argue, and when there was no response she waved a hand idly. 

“Go ahead. Back date it about three hours before we landed, that way it will look like we sat on the decision before diving.” 

_‘Understood.’_

"We've been on surface for how many hours, EDI?"

_'Thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes and counting Commander. On-ship time is 20:43.'_

"Approximate planetary time?"

 _'Based on the position of both moons, 21:00. Sunrise should be between 04:00 and 06:00 based on your current elevation.'_

"Anyone feeling like they need to rest?"

"Not yet, but I'm assuming the moment we walk outside the bounds of the field it'll catch up to us." 

"Agreed. Chakwas-"

"I'm already tracking it; I will let you know when we hit the 24-hour mark and we'll decide on how to proceed from there. Worst case scenario is we take a hop out of the field, exhaust ourselves, and come back in to sleep and trust Mal'hari to wake us at a decent time." Jacob pulled a face, shaking his head. 

"The trust thing is what gets me. I don't know how to feel about him. I mean, he sounded honest, but the thing with his markings and the whole 'unable to tell when he's influenced by a god-not-god' situation really doesn't instill a lot of trust if the Evanuris are real."

"Which is a big if."

"Is it, though? We're fighting against the Collectors and the Reapers, both of which people have evidence of but still won't believe in. They could be the Reapers of this world." 

"But magic? Really? Are we going to accept that magic as a metaphysical force exists? That has to be a concerted attempt to avoid mentioning certain technologies. He's obviously leaning on our assumption the whole civilization was semi-intelligent." 

"I'd accept that if we hadn't seen things that shouldn't be possible using conventional means. The eluvian sure as hell shouldn't work at that size if it's a manufactured wormhole, much less a system of controlled ones. Unless someone figured out how to harness dark matter and twist the laws of physics without achieving flight in any fashion, I'm inclined to agree that there's a little magic at work." Miranda didn’t seem happy with the deflection, but couldn’t produce a solid enough argument against it, sighing and looking to Chakwas. 

"Can we establish how old he is based on what you collected during the exam?"

"Yes, and he is telling the truth in that regard. The collected cell samples from multiple areas in his body carried a high level of telomerase, which facilitates continuous cell growth. This usually would indicate the presence of a malignant cancer or non-cancerous tumor, but his white blood cell count is within normal ranges and there are no other markers that would indicate something wrong. Given similar telomerase levels I’ve seen in the asari and krogan, it is more likely the case that his DNA simply allows for continuous, or at least a much longer term, of cell regeneration and growth to combat the gradual decline that constitutes aging as we classify it. He shows some signs of advancing age; greying hair, a decline in skin elasticity, minor symptoms of arthritis in the knees and hips, but otherwise he is comparably middle-aged, quite fit, and at least 3,000 years old based on the bone density data I could draw from the scans."

"And none of that data can be explained with different reasons? There's no way that level of telomerase is just natural?"

"Possibly, but without a second member, or more, of his species to compare, it is the only projection I can make."

"Is he actually a different species? Or just human variant?"

"The differences are few enough that I'd say variant, but I don't know how he would take being told he's just a human with some mutations. And he technically is older than humans on this planet, so it's entirely possible humans are elf-variants on this world. It hardly matters, I've classified his genetic details as an unknown species panel until we come across another, if we ever do. What the real question is, is how this genetic 'immortality' was stripped from others of his kind when the Veil went up." Shepard, miraculously, managed to avoid Thane's gaze when she felt it crawl across the side of her neck. A dream wasn't enough evidence of other survivors. Chakwas closed out of her notes, continuing.

"I think our focus should be on unravelling what exactly constitutes the Taint, because as of now the explanation we have is a possibly contagious case of religious penance, and regardless of your beliefs, I can't accept that sin is communicable."

"Do you think he’ll let us study it to the extent we can gather meaningful data? It seemed more like he was going to give us books and hope for the best."

"Books can always be a start. Any evidence of even basic understanding will give Mordin and I a place to jump from. And he indicated that people experimented with the Taint, meaning there may be projections on infection rates that he couldn't have deciphered." 

"If he has the manuscripts."

"Yes."

"Are we planning on curing this disease, now? Because the initial reason you wanted to touch down was due to a lack of information on the plague. We now have that, meaning mission accomplished." All eyes swiveled to her, and Shepard found herself hesitating. Investigating was all well and good, but it usually led to solving whatever mystery had presented itself. Under first contact protocol they technically weren't allowed to significantly impact a primitive civilization's quality of life or established technology with their technology. But if the civilization was at risk of dying out and qualified for the savior protocol (Section 567-57391 Addendum A, Sub Section 75619S), they could step in to preserve 'a significant culture, population, and/or society'. Significant being the operative word, which usually got people debating on what that word meant. Did it mean a certain number of threatened people had to be present before the effort expended was worthwhile? Would that make sole survivors or small groups insignificant, regardless of their culture or society? If a culture is inherently violent, like the Yahg or Batarians, is that grounds to side with morality and allow them to perish for the good of the galaxy? Or is that culture more significant because it allows for study and demonstrates a hard line for the Council races to never cross? And what if the cultural norms spit in the face of the savior's own values? What if the culture was something they were biased, or even prejudiced, against? Is that grounds to label a people or society as insignificant? It was all very thought provoking and a deeply philosophical arm-chair debate for those that engaged in them. Shepard tended to lean to the side of the 'lives are worth saving' team and cut out the middle-man of quantifying the significance of life. It made it easier to sleep at night. 

"I hate to be the one to bring laws into it, but first contact protocol does have a clause for the preservation of threatened populations, particularly those that have a significant culture or society at risk. I'd say, given the fact our threatened population is currently one, but that one knows multiple languages, can account a near full history of their land, and owns thousands of texts about their world, they fit this category. Under that stipulation we're allowed to help with whatever means we deem necessary." Chakwas seemed the least surprised by her sudden knowledge of the smallest parts if first contact law, though Thane remained in his constant, unruffled state as was his signature. She wasn't insulted by the surprise, people tended to think she got into the academy because of her combat scores, not the near encyclopedic knowledge of laws and regulations and how to finagle them to best suit herself. Then again, not everyone knew she acted as the resident legal professional for her street crew back on Earth, either. 

"With that in mind I'm putting up two mission parameters, one, we discover the inner workings of the disease. Meaning we classify it, isolate a disease cell for examination, and identify antibodies if possible. If we can’t, we swap to phase two and attempt to eradicate the known cause of the affliction to allow the population to cope with the disease outside a potentially infective environment." 

"And if we can't do either?" 

"...then we float an offer of relocation. It's only fair to give him the option." Miranda immediately straightened, raising her argument just as Shepard offered her mollification. It was an old routine. Almost required at this point, really. 

"The logistics of relocating-"

"I know. But we just told him that it's possible to move an entire species to a new home. To never give that option to him would be cruel."

"And how would we protect him from the immediate threat of kidnapping? The price for a female drell is high enough on the black market; a breeding-age, sole surviving, technically immortal, newly discovered intelligent species will dominate the market for years, possibly for the remainder of his life."

"Only if word got out that he existed. The Illusive Man doesn't exist on record, neither does the Shadow Broker. We could bury him under so much paperwork he'd fly under the radar." 

"We're talking about a man who didn't know his world is round, Commander. He may be intelligent, extremely so, but he wouldn't stand a chance in the surveillance state we live in. Even Thane can't avoid getting caught on CCTV at least once. One misstep outside and he'd show up on every slaver board in the galaxy." She had a very good point, despite Shepard's initial reaction to argue. "I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything to help, but the planning for maintaining an off the grid existence takes years. Years we don't have on hand." 

"Then how can we sincerely offer escape? We can't just dangle salvation in front of him like a carrot on a stick and never follow through." 

"I don't know, but I’ll put my mind to it once I'm on the Normandy and the Illusive Man has been sorted out." 

_'Speaking of the Normandy, Commander, Joker advises that remaining locked in orbit is agreeable, but there will eventually be a requirement to refuel. Reserves are currently at 76.48%, and will sustain orbit for two and a half weeks.'_

"And the lander?"

 _'The lander can sustain three more trips before requiring refueling. Refueling from the Normandy's reserves would consume 35% of the available fuel and would affect the duration of sustaining orbit.'_ The unspoken warning about the effect on their ability to make it to a relay afterwards was felt across those present to hear, Shepard sighing and rubbing her face. Finally, Miranda spoke again. 

"I would suggest we set a time limit; we are, after all, still on the tail of the Collectors and that does eventually need to take precedence. We can make do with three trips on the lander, I take one up, send the lander down with whatever supplies or people needed, and the final trip up will be reserved for the complete exit. Agreed?"

"Agreed. If we finagle the suspension barrier, we could maximize on seven days. EDI, set a timer for seven days starting now, mandatory exodus regardless of progress." 

_‘ Mission timer set. Commander, you have 167 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds. I will update you every 24 hours.’_

“Thanks Edi. No pressure.” 

 

As it turned out, not needing to sleep, eat, or shit made working for long spans very easy. It didn't mean she could retain focus for hours on end, but it did make it easier to get sucked into conversations and not realize how long they'd gone on until EDI gleefully chimed in about the passage of time. Shepard was surprised by the level of enthusiasm Miranda put into translating things, and with her rapidly growing understanding, the functioning translation matrix, and Mal'hari's polyglot nature, the fact their research material was in an entirely new language didn't slow them all that much. Both Mordin and Chakwas seemed the most enthralled, passing of notes and possible diagnoses as they took what they read and applied it to various medical journals and case studies about bizarre diseases. She heard mention of meningitis, both simple and complex, encephalitis, glioblastomas, the Marburg virus, TH-314, and other diseases and mutations she couldn't hope to pronounce on the first or fifth try. Of the ones she could readily identify, none were pleasant. Yet for all the similarities the Taint had, none seemed to come close enough to its nature to fit correctly. It was too infectious to simply be on the level of measles or smallpox, and while it appeared to be based as an identifiable bloodborne pathogen, none of the galactic equivalents had ever jumped from person to plant to animal to the literal ground before. Or reanimated corpses. Shepard was too out of her depth to try and offer any kind of suggestion to the two most qualified people in the room, and so she was stuck handing over books and engaging in basic conversation while they, metaphorically, burned rubber around her. Mal’hari seemed to feel the same, though he was at least outwardly gleeful about being the stupidest person in the room, occupying his time by chatting with Miranda and Jacob while scanning the progressively growing tower of books for passages for the two brains to look at. Once or twice he stepped out only to bring another armful of books from the library within the atrium, ferrying things back and forth and back again depending on what Mordin and Chakwas needed. Shepard did take notice that he never slipped away to find that bottle of wine of his, but she was guessing it’d happen eventually. Likely when he could get away with punching a wall unnoticed. She sighed and scratched at her scalp w, completely mussing her hair before patting it down again and leaning back to stretch her shoulders, catching the tail end of whatever Jacob was saying. 

“The whole situation was kind of screwy, because on the one hand we did break the law, but on the other we didn't know the law existed, yet ignorance of a rule isn't a defense if it's put into court. But their reaction to the whole thing was way out of proportion by most standards, even though by their standards the reaction to a potential invasion was lenient. So, some people still hold a grudge about it."

“Understandably so, from both sides.” 

“Yeah. It really wasn’t an ideal way for us to get our foot in the door, but things have sort of smoothed out now. And now that humans are on the Council, the big governing body for the galaxy, essentially, it put some strain on some of the external relationships."

“Given that your crew is not entirely human, I was assuming so. Unless your crew is ‘everyone but the Turians’.” Jacob shook his head and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“Nah, we have one on board. He’s Shepard’s best friend, actually. Right Commander?” She nodded, leaning over to pass a few papers to Chakwas when she reached for them. 

“Pretty close to it, yeah.” 

"But we can agree he's a bit of an ass." She reeled back and put a hand over her heart, giving him the most twisted look of offense possible.

"Garrus has done nothing wrong, ever. He is a perfect specimen of his species and I resent your attempt to give depth to his character in such a way." Both Mal'hari and Jacob chuckled, which was enough for her to kill the joke, leaning onto her elbows once more. "Yes, he can be snarky at times, but I think that's requisite for snipers. They get cocky when they can put holes in someone's head from a mile away." 

"Using a weapon?"

"Uh...yeah. A projectile weapon." She was surprised when he didn't press for clarification, though she saw the hints of interest behind the satisfied nod he gave her in response. 

"Impressive."

"Without a doubt, but it can be terrifying sometimes."

"I'm sure. A mile is...well, I've only managed about 400 meters with a longbow. With perfect wind conditions, a good stretch, and a professionally balanced arrow."

"That's at the top of the range for those weapons, if I remember correctly, so proportionately it's the same."

"I'll take the consolation prize. Doctor Chakwas, I'm feeling quite foolish, but I just remembered there is a small series regarding lyrium crystals and the Taint that might be of interest to you." For all her politeness, Chakwas did not look up from her current project, nodding idly and waving a hand to show she had heard him. 

"That would be, yes. Before you go, though, could you enlighten me about the significance of Veisshaupt? Is it a commonly used astringent, or a place?"

"Weisshaupt was the main branch of the Grey Wardens. They housed most of their research and historical texts within a vault there."

"So, references to it are likely in context of other research materials that are not readily available?"

"I would expect so. Academic reference style was...a little outside my area of interest."

"It tends to be that way for most, I assure you. Do you have any copies of whatever was contained there?"

"No copies, just the original texts I've managed to bring back during my trips."

"How far is Weisshaupt from where we are?" There was a pause as Mal’hari quietly calculated the distance, rolling his head back and forth for a moment before shrugging and finally responding. 

"At least two month's travel by foot or horse, but near instant with the eluvians. Depending on what information you need it may require a trip to the stronghold, but I wouldn't suggest going unless you have more of that sealed armor."

"We do, it’s just on the main vessel."

"Which will consume resources to collect, correct?" Shepard nodded, choosing then to be as honest as she possibly could be. 

"The lander you saw can manage three more trips before we have to refuel it, and one trip is already spoken for since Miranda has elected to return for overwatch support." 

"And another trip is taken when it is sent back with whatever supplies you require, these suits included."

"Yes. I might send for another person to take Miranda's place, solely for support in the event we do end up having to go to our second phase. They'll come down with the supplies, leaving us with the final return trip."

"And you do not have enough fuel to refill the lander and retain your...ship's abilities?"

"We can, but it'd be a squeeze...and we do have obligations outside this side mission." He took that answer surprisingly well, given that there was a significant chance he may be left behind. 

"I assumed as much. I will see how well we can get by with the texts I have here and then we can see about trying to make a trip to the vault." He offered a small, diplomatic smile, and motioned towards the door that led to the atrium. "Shepard, if you could join me. Another set of hands would be beneficial.” She caught the barest nod of Mordin's head in her periphery, and chose not to argue, squeezing out from the table. Thane cocked his head slightly, not immediately making to follow her but clearly ready to do so on her request. In the split moment between Mal’hari pushing away from the table and standing, she waved off the offer and turned to follow their host, casting a look at him over her shoulder to make sure he knew she’d call if she needed him. With a small nod, Thane went back to scanning the book in front of him, Mal’hari sighing and leading her back towards the atrium. Once they passed through the threshold, he let the door swing shut and paused for the barest moment, looking at the desk before turning towards the stairwell. Shepard, deciding to get the ball rolling, asked a question she inexplicably already had the answer to.

“Did Solas always hang around in this area of the castle?” He paused, looking back at her. 

“A large portion of his time was spent here, yes.” 

“Does the Fade...remember mages? Like if they lived somewhere for a really long time, would the Fade absorb part of them or something?” 

“The Fade can retain memories, if they are attached to significant emotions. Why do you ask?” 

“I...well, I had a stupid idea. You said I was like a mage, which was why I reacted to the guardians of the Crossroads, so that means I could dream like a mage here, yes?” He nodded, face utterly unreadable as he waited for the other shoe to drop.

“That path of logic is sound.” 

“So, if I fell asleep somewhere, I might see memories that are in the Fade.” Mal’hari smiled, a slow, curling expression that made his ears tip back slightly, giving him a strangely smug, feline look. 

“I think the more pertinent question is what memories you have already seen.” 

“You know, I always forget assassins are a pain in the ass.” He coughed out a small laugh and nodded, motioning to his face with a hand. 

“You’re an expressive woman, and the habit of reading micro expressions is so ingrained I can’t stop now. I’m sure Thane knows the same struggle.” He started up the stairs, beckoning Shepard along. At the very least he hadn’t automatically attacked her for encroaching on some unspoken barrier. There was a stretch of silence as they ascended the steps, a whiff of dust and old paper hitting her as they stepped onto the landing, an unwelcome sense of nostalgia and comfort coming with it. Being back in the library after the dream felt a little like she was walking into someone's bedroom without asking. The chair stuffed between the bookcases was weirdly significant, now. Mal'hari went to the right-most bookcase, carefully examining the spines of the books crammed in from end to end before drawing one out and opening it quickly.

“Come, tell me what you’ve seen. Anything particularly raunchy?” 

“No. Well, I mean...not really? I saw Cullen yelling at you. After Haven, about the bodies.” He nodded, looking up at her to indicate he was listening before dropping his gaze to the pages, his face unreadable yet again. “And constructing the training ring with Varric, the conversation about Magister...something on the balcony with Vivienne, sitting down in the atrium while Solas painted when you were supposed to be planning a party, coming up here to the library when Dorian complained about the alchemy books, when-when you danced with Cassandra in the tavern-” She paused to take a breath, realizing she’d let out a torrent of words she wasn’t sure his translator caught entirely, but when she looked up at him that concern went right out the window. Mal’hari was looking at her as if she’d gutted him and he was happy about it, a strange mix of pain, glee, and concern on his face. 

“You saw quite a bit.” 

“I-yeah, I guess, but that wasn’t all of it.” His ears perked up, a silent yet enthusiastic request for her to go on. “I saw Solas twice. And the reason I asked about the Fade taking pieces of people is because I think I saw the three mages in the most clarity. I could literally smell Dorian, and Vivienne was as clear as I see you right now. And they were all mages, right?” 

“Of the highest caliber. Mages are more connected to the Fade, so it is reasonable you would have a clearer picture of them. I’m assuming Varric was very hard to see?” 

“I only made out his silhouette and his voice.” He nodded, continuing to pick books off the shelves and tuck them into his arm. “But I _talked_ to Solas.” That brought him pause, Mal’hari’s face twisting slightly as he looked to her again.

“You spoke to him? With him?” 

“I spoke at him. He didn’t respond, but he-I felt him when he grabbed me. It felt too real to be a dream, and I want to know whether that was just a spirit or something taking his face and getting grabby, or if that means he’s alive.” There was a long stretch of silence, Mal’hari’s face going through a series of very complicated emotions and expressions as he processed what she had told him. When he spoke next, it was in a measured, slow tone, his gaze not quite meeting hers. 

“My experience with being touched in the Fade only stemmed from Solas taking total control of a piece of the Fade and making it very close to reality. Achieving the sensation of touch is fairly simple and not outside a spirit, or demon’s ability. Based solely on that I am more confident in saying you may have attracted a demon or a warping spirit of curiosity. What else happened?” 

“I was watching you dance with Cassandra; the tavern was full of people and it looked like there was a party going on. The-uh the Iron Bull? He was there, handing out drinks and things. It was a happy memory and things started going faster and spinning and getting worse until it was just red and screaming and awful, and suddenly it went back to just the Tavern, except no one was there but me and all the food and drinks. Complete silence, and completely stable, like the world snapped back into place.” He nodded, listening intently, shifting to set the books down on the chair. “Then I turned around and he was just standing in the doorway looking at me. I told him I didn’t do anything to make the memory change and he started walking towards me, I backed up, he walked towards me again, I backed up, then he apparently jumped forward a crazy distance and grabbed my throat.” 

“And he never spoke?” 

“No. I sort of scared him off before he could, I think.” 

“How?” 

“I...I made the dream a nightmare by thinking about all the awful shit I’ve gone through. Got him to back off and I woke up.” He nodded, rubbing at his jaw slowly. “Does that change your thoughts?” 

“Using fear was a good tactic to scare off a spirit, but if it was Solas himself...he may try seeking you out again.” 

“So, do I try sleeping again and see if we can get him here? If there’s two of you we have a better chance of figuring out the Taint, right?” 

“...possibly. I do not know how he would react to seeing your non-human friends, though. Or how willing he would be to help.” 

“If he’s not willing to find a solution after 1,500 years I think he’s a lost cause. I’m sorry, but someone that far up their own ass really isn’t worth it.” He snorted, conceding that point with a nod. “But I won’t go stomping around making noise if you want to avoid contact. At the end of the day we’re running by your rules.” There was another long pause, the weight of hesitation and uncertainty becoming cloying in the air around him as his gaze went unfocused, a look of near dread crossing his face before he came back to the present. 

“I would...I would torture myself more if we did not at least try. But we must find a way to have you accompanied by someone, if possible. If you end up baiting a demon…” Shepard wasn’t sure what the ramifications were for a mage-like person to end up cornered by a demon, but she figured it probably started at possession and ramped up in terribleness from there. 

“Read up on it, we have time.” 

“A week is not a lot of time.” 

“No, but it’s what we've got.” Mal’hari chuckled and nodded, turning his attention back to the bookshelves. “Can I ask another question?” 

“Of course.” 

“Who did you show Mordin?” Again, he laughed, shaking his head in mock disbelief as he turned back to face her. 

"You are full of questions with depth and complexity, yet you ask them with so few words."

"The word you’re looking for is direct, but I appreciate the compliment." He chuckled softly, going quiet for a short span of time while drumming his fingers on the cover of the book he had pulled off a lower shelf.

"I lied to you.” She rested her weight on one foot, cocking her posture to the side and giving him an unimpressed look. 

“Anyone as honest as you is always lying about something.” 

“I am lying about many things, but nothing as big as the existence of my friend. I feel justified in it, however, considering his nature is nebulous and difficult to describe.” 

“A spirit? Or something else?” 

“A spirit that is a human at the same time, yet not a possessed person as would normally be the case with a spirit in a tangible body. 

“You’ll need to expand on that a bit.” 

“He is and is not human simultaneously, and that makes him both unique and very delicate.” 

“And he’s been around since before the collapse? Or did he come around after?” 

“Before. He helped fight Corypheus.” 

"Is he here?” He rocked his head from side to side, seeming to waffle on that answer. 

“Yes, and no. I think he is currently somewhere on the third level, but when he does not want to be seen, he will not be seen, for the most part.” 

“How does he do that?”

“Based on my understanding, he exists both here and in the Fade, to some extent, and if he doesn’t want to be in a certain place or seen by certain people he can make it so by removing himself from this side of the coin, as it were.” 

"And...he can just be wherever? Whenever?” 

"Not in a threatening sense, and within reason; he tends to stay in the tavern or the gardens as they are...they carry the most memories, but he can pop in and out a little unexpectedly."

"That's...I don’t know whether to call that handy or unsettling." 

"A little of both is appropriate, luckily he knows it startles people and will only, likely, do it when I am around to make sure that anyone new will not be completely thrown by his presence.” 

“What kind of spirit is he? Or is he just a spirit and that’s all you know?”

“He is a spirit of compassion.” 

“How does a spirit of compassion cope with...all of this?” Mal’hari smiled sadly, flipping through a section of the book he held before adding it to his pile. 

“Not well. Admittedly...I don’t know how much longer he can stay here, even if he wanted to. This place, as you now know, is up to its eyes with memories and feelings, and many of the worst are the ones that linger the longest. For a creature that is compassion, feeling so much pain from the people you know and loved and who knew and loved you is overwhelming." She nodded, already feeling the sick swell of dread in her stomach.

"Is he sane?"

"Comparably. If he wasn’t, he would have corrupted by now." After a span of silence Shepard bit the bullet and kept pushing. 

"What happens when compassion is corrupted?” 

“In these circumstances...I would say he would become despair. Or dread. At worst, suffering.” 

“There are demons of suffering?” 

“If there is a negative facet of emotion, there is a demon for it. Though...a being of pure suffering is rare. Despair is far more common, especially in a place like this.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He nodded, pulling in a steadying breath and setting another book on the chair. “Did you bring me up here to meet him?” 

“I did. Thane will be the next one, since Cole wants to apologize to him.” It took her a moment, but the pieces fell into place rather rapidly the moment she added ‘invisible force’ into the mix. 

"The tavern. He made Thane forget."

"Which, by my understanding, should be impossible.” 

“It’s very hard to make a drell forget, the only thing they don’t remember is being born because it’s too traumatic. Everything else sticks, even severe head trauma can’t knock it loose.” 

“Which is impressive and terrifying in turns.” 

“It can be, yeah. It also makes it very difficult to renege on something you said. Is that something spirits can do? Or just...what’s his name?” 

“Cole. And the ability is unique to him. He simply...vanishes from your thoughts as readily as he does your sight, and I still have no idea how he does it.” 

“You realize that really isn’t a comforting thought.” 

“It isn’t, but I am not telling you to make it a threat. If I am to be honest about him, I must be honest about all of him, including the part that makes him...dangerous.”

“And all of what you said isn’t already enough reason to be wary?” 

“It should be enough for any sensible person to take pause, but what I wish to tell you next is as a fair warning so you and your crew may prepare. Cole is compassionate, and to be compassionate is to be empathetic...and for something that is the incarnation of compassion, his empathy runs deep enough he can...see hurt. The...ah...the shadows of the mind. Things that give recurring nightmares and waking terrors.” 

“He can read trauma on someone? At any time he wants?” 

“More all the time, even when he does not want to. And while that in and of itself is taxing, he also is not trained in the same social graces as the rest of us, and he tends to simply speak about theses shadows, usually in the most indirect yet direct fashion possible, and that can be jarring to people. When he makes someone forget, it is usually to take away the hurt he unwittingly imparts on someone when trying to help.” 

“So, he can’t read minds, just emotional hang-ups.” 

“And that isn’t just with bad things, though his focus usually lies there. He wants to help, and he doesn’t understand why we fleshy folk keep all our issues on the inside where it can rot us, so he pushes it out into the open so we deal with it instead.” 

“And if you’re warning me about it now…”

“He’s already done it with Mordin. Something about an engineered sickness?” Shepard barely suppressed the wince, nodding. “He is haunted by it.” 

“A lot of people are. I hate to say it but…it’s not undeserved, considering what it’s done to the victims.” She was surprised when he did not ask for specifics, his gaze lingering on her for a moment before he went back to his task, leaving her to entertain herself until he finished, or Cole made his appearance. After a few moments of wandering around the landing she returned and grabbed a random book off the shelf, not even paying attention to the cover and flipping through the pages idly, attempting to sound out the runes she recognized. She could manage a few of them per word, which was a good start, but overall it was more like looking at a picture book. She didn’t mind overmuch though. The book as an object was just as fascinating as whatever was written in it, honestly. This one was _hand printed_ , something even older than letter block pressing if she remembered right. She could see small imperfections in the spacing of words and in each line of text, but from arm’s length it looked perfect. Shepard looked up from the pages to ask what the text in her hands contained when she was met by a new face peering out from around the bookcase Mal'hari was sorting through. His face was sunken, hidden under straw blonde, straw textured hair and grey eyes peering out from under a massive wide brimmed hat. For the briefest moment he looked as if he had drowned; a walking, water-logged corpse. She didn't jump, Shepard had put the kibosh on that fear reaction years ago, but she sure as hell gasped. Mal'hari's ears perked up and he glanced back at her, leaning to the side to follow her line of sight.

"Ah, hello Cole. Are you here to help with the books?" Cole, nodded slowly and stayed put, eventually pulling his sunken gaze away from her and fixing his attention on his friend. "Did you want to say hello?" 

"She already knows me." Mal’hari smiled and nodded, his persona not quite reaching the level of an overly patient parent of a shy child, but settling somewhere around a teacher caught with the same kid. 

"She knows about you, she doesn't _know_ you yet." The concept seemed to both sink in and not, his wide, grey blue eyes staring and staring until he blinked again and nodded, the massive brim of his hat bobbing with the motion before he turned his attention to her again. Shepard raised a hand in a half-wave, deciding the best course of action would be approaching Cole like an extremely sheltered homeschooler. He certainly gave the vibes of one.

"It's nice to finally meet you, Cole. Did Mordin give you one of the translators?" Instead of responding to her question, Cole answered with one of his own looking at, and through, her. 

"Is it?” She shrugged, dropping her hand and shutting the book carefully. 

“I like meeting new people from time to time. And you’re person-shaped, so it’s nice to meet you.” He blinked at her vapidly before stepping out from behind the bookshelf, his height almost doubling as he uncurled from the half-bent posture he’d been keeping behind the shelf. Mal’hari chuckled and handed him a book, Cole’s spidery hands clutching at it. After a moment of silence, he looked back at her, looking fairly confused.

“But everyone is people-shaped."

"Yes."

"So, everyone is nice to meet?"

"Until they do something that puts me off them, yeah." He nodded for a moment, eyes sliding down to the book in her hands. "Do you want this one?" All she got was a shake of his head, Mal'hari watching her over his shoulder and smiling slightly, offering Cole another book, this one an ugly shade of yellow that matched the strange mis-matched patchwork of his shirt. He took it as well, cradling the items against his, surely concave, chest, not quite watching Shepard from his periphery. 

"Have you found anything that catches your interest, Commander?"

"At this point I think it's just the color of the cover that can interest me, I don't pick up languages like Miranda can." 

“She certainly is gifted.”

“That’s one word for it, yeah.”

“Is that not a good thing?” 

“Not really? It’s hard to explain without exposing some personal shit.” He dipped his head in understanding and motioned to the shelves, smiling. 

"Well, do any of the colors interest you?" Shepard flashed the cover of the book at him, waving it gently. 

"I grabbed this one first." He glanced at the cover and visibly struggled to keep a smile off his face. "What did I grab?"

"That is what we call a bodice ripper. I’m sure there may be some archaeological value in it, but only for the sake of teaching people how not to enjoy carnal pleasures."

"Oh spectacular. What's it about?" He held out a hand, Shepard gladly handing it over and stepping back to let the terror commence. It took him a moment to scan the first few pages before he shut the book and handed it back to her. 

"A dashing Templar and his besotted lady, guard-captain of the wall. About as generic as you can get, and written under an assumed name of an assumed name for the shame it brought the author. The sex starts in chapter three, and it lasts twenty terrible pages."

"Twenty?"

"Last I counted I think 'turgid' was mentioned at least fifty times, and in reference to bosoms at least once. It was very popular in the past."

"The more things change…" She glanced at Cole, who was surprisingly very uninterested in the prime opportunity to peek in on porn and was instead thumbing through the book in his hands slowly, eyes scanning the pages as if the words were curling off the ends of the paper. And for all she knew, they could be. Who was to say spirits couldn't see the ghosts of a writer on the pages?

"Why is it here?"

"It's only proper to put a book on a shelf, and it...it's a signed copy." There was no ashamed blush at that admission, as surprising as it was, Mal'hari smiling softly. "And I think it would infuriate the actual librarian to put it next to the anatomical texts, which was always part of the fun. Cole, are you going to stay here, or would you like to meet the others?” 

“Are we telling them the truth now?” 

“About you, yes. But only if you wish. I’m sure Shepard has lied to her crew about small things before.” 

“She is.” Cole didn’t need to expand on that fact, but the admission, coming from someone who had no chance to even know her, gave her a fresh roll of chills down her spine. It didn’t help that Cole was looking at her when he said it, not in accusation, but somehow in understanding. As if he knew what it was like to die and shrug it off. Something about necromancy was too familiar of a concept for her to shake the feeling he might be a reanimated corpse.

“It’s part of being in command, the worst part of the job description in my opinion.” He didn’t respond, simply blinking and looking back at Mal’hari, holding out the books in one hand. Within a second of the books leaving his hand Cole was gone again, Mal’hari letting out a long breath and stacking the books into his arms. 

“Well, he could have done worse than call you a liar.” 

“Yeah, I guess. Any idea where he ran off to?” 

“Likely to watch for a while. He may choose to single your crew out to tackle introductions one on one before trying a group. You are all walking wounds, and he is only one needle.” 

“You make that sound more ominous than I think you intended it.” 

“I tend to do that. Warn Thane, he is likely next on the list.” With that Mal’hari smiled and turned, heading down the stairs with the books carefully balanced in one hand, very clearly in no need of help and leaving Shepard to stare at Dorian’s seat. Even in the faint illumination left by the torch and the moonlight she could make out where the dust had settled on the cushions, and where the void of legs remained, somehow unbroken by the books that had been placed there before. As if he’d just gotten up and gone to find another bottle of wine. Shepard had to shake herself physically to break off the strange malaise that fell over her, taking the steps two at a time to avoid seeming too attached to any particular area in the castle, and grabbing two books off Mal’hari’s stack just to keep some sort of appearance for the crew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, who knew that if your job was composed of typing all day, you'd get burnt out on typing for fun? Anyways, Chapters 9 and 10 are planned and in process, so the next update shouldn't be too far behind this one. Fingers crossed.


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